All My Bones (they stand for you)
by YellowFlicker
Summary: She extends her arm when he's close enough to the edge of the net and their eyes meet. He's still breathless, still smiling and half-stunned, but when she finds his eyes, she's surprised by how stern they are, how insistent. "What, were you pushed?" "No." there's a bit of defensiveness there too. Her lips curl a bit on one side. "No, of course not." [Divergent au]
1. First Jumper

She doesn't go to the choosing ceremony. She never has, not in the three years she's been in Dauntless - even gone so far as to collect a couple of favors so that she didn't have to. (she's only had to do that once. Shado and Laurel cover for her most of the time, even against Nyssa's sharp and prying eyes. And really, for the most part, when it comes to this they leave her alone. Even Laurel's Candor roots take the back seat on this particular issue.)

Right now, as she waits by the net, she idly wonders about who is going to jump first. There's a betting pool on it. Always is - every year. It's easy to bet that it's gonna be a Dauntless-born kid, but there's no good money in easy.

Felicity is usually careful who she chooses - evaluating their personalities makes it a statistics game to figure out who it's going to be. But sometimes she expects a big-brained Erudite transfer to know a scare tactic when they see one and figure out that, Dauntless or not, they wouldn't really ask their initiates to kill themselves on first day, and take that first jump regardless. (figure out the obvious the way she had, back when she had to take that jump. She'd guessed almost before the words were out of Nyssa's mouth. But she hadn't gone to the ledge on purpose back then. Hadn't wanted to make herself even more noticeable than she already felt.)

She's picked the right one two years in a row now.

When he comes hurdling through the hole in the ceiling, blue robes flying and with a scream that is half a laugh stuck in his throat, she bites the inside of her cheek to contain her satisfaction as Laurel curses in the background. Lets make that three years, she thinks without being able to contain the little spark of satisfaction that winning brings her.

"How do you always know?" Laurel hisses and Felicity indulges in exactly one smile before she turns to the initiate.

Oliver Queen: the Erudite-born kid with a fuck-off attitude and everything to prove to literally everyone. Yeah, not really a difficult choice, this one. She'd picked him as first jumper the moment she heard he was among the transfers.

She gives him a moment to just lay there on the net and absorb the fact that he just jumped down a seven stories high building. It can be jarring the first time - she remembers that as she watches him laying there, shaking a little bit, a choked laugh stuck in his throat.

But then the three seconds are over and she grabs the net and pulls, causing him to tumble forward. She extends her arm when he's close enough to the edge of the net. He's still breathless, still smiling and half-stunned, but when she finds his eyes, she's surprised by how stern they are, how insistent. He's pretty and it's easy to notice, in that boring way of handsome faces. But his eyes... his eyes are beautiful. (the thought comes from literally nowhere and it feels so foreign that it's almost as if someone standing next to her whispered in her ear)

He grasps her forearm and she grasps his, helping him down.

His feet hit the ground hard and he's still swaying. She doesn't let go until he has his feet under him.

"Were you pushed?"

"No." but there's a bit of defensiveness in his tone .

Her lips curl a bit on one side.

"No, of course not." He doesn't react to that, though she thinks she can see something move in his eyes before he blinks it away. "What's your name?"

"What, you don't know?" His tone is a challenge, but that challenge leaves his face pretty quickly as her expression rearranges in the hard lines of the patented deadpan stare that she has worn as a second face for years.

Oh, she knows. Of course she knows. (he's not as famous as he thinks he is but there is no way of being friends with Laurel without knowing about Ollie Queen). She knows plenty of things she has no business knowing, but Dauntless is the wrong place for Ollie Queen's I-don't-give-a-shit-ask-me-how attitude and the sooner he gets that through his skull, the sooner his chances for survival are gonna go up.

"Your name, initiate." She repeats, steady; cold now. His face falls out and he straightens. She softens her tone just a little bit. "Chose carefully, you only get to pick once."

He opens his mouth, closes it. Blinks at her. She almost smiles at his hesitancy.

She knows the feeling.

"Oliver." He says finally.

Somewhere in half shadow Laurel snorts. "What, not Ollie?" And there's no missing that harsh mocking note in her voice.

He pinches his lips together, standing straighter when he recognizes Laurel's voice, his face rearranging in determined lines, fists clenching.

"No. Just Oliver."

Felicity allows one nod to that. She raises her voice so that the others can hear. "First jumper, Oliver!"

She doesn't look away from him as she says it, which is why she doesn't miss his startled eyes looking around when the shadows of the building echo his name with cheers. Felicity ushers him forward towards them with one hand between his shoulder-blades. He's taller than her by almost a foot, but it doesn't matter. Here she's steadier than most.

"Welcome to Dauntless, Oliver." She tells him in a low voice that is only meant for his ears, straight faced and steady. He holds her eyes as he nods, just as the second jumper tears the air, her resounding laughter and high-pitched screaming mixing and tickling the walls. Laurel starts towards the net to pick up her sister who rolls to the edge in a flurry of black and white clothes and golden-blonde hair. The dauntless from the edge of the building keep cheering.

Laurel pulls Sara down. Her cheeky smile and the dimpled chin are the first things Felicity notices about her.

"Hey sis."

Laurel rolls her eyes. "Hey yourself, birdie." She says, more warmly than Felicity's heard Laurel sound in a long time. Then she pushes her sister towards her new faction. "Get going."

And that's how Four's third and last class of initiates starts.


	2. Two Lessons

Logically speaking, he knows where Sara is coming from - their instructor really is actually tiny: barely five feet five and though her limbs seem rounded with muscle, she still is slip. She'd seemed so still when he was on the platform, placid almost in comparison to the loud and wild Dauntless around them. But he knows immediately that antagonizing her is a bad idea, even before she gets up in Sara's face, dead-eyed and cold, pale face completely devoid of expression. It's instinctive for him, to be weary of someone that can look at you and see straight through you like that. Because where her calm had been steadying before when she helped him down the net, that same stillness was acutely threatening now. There was something cold about her that had nothing to do with her back-streaked eyes; something dangerous beneath that stillness that seemed to preclude danger the same way the tiny smirk on her maroon lips did - like a hook catching beneath his skin, pulling. Making him want to look away. And that was before she threw someone more than twice her size over her shoulder and across the corridor like it was nothing.

The look she gave Sara after, that low voiced threat that resounded louder than any yell across all of them, made Oliver wonder for the fifth time that morning what the hell he'd gotten himself into, choosing these crazy people as his faction.

o

Nyssa walks briskly - Laurel and Felicity have no trouble keeping up, but the shuffle of the initiates behind them tells Felicity they are exactly as freaked out as expected. This is what the Dauntless want after all - otherwise they wouldn't make people jump off building their first moment there.

They all stop and Nyssa turns towards the initiates her mouth curled into a sharp smile.

"This is where we divide. The Dauntless-born come with me." Her smile sharpens, widens, dark eyes glinting. "You don't need a tour of the place, I'm guessing. The rest go with Four."

The dauntless-born melt in the shadows with Nyssa and Laurel follows them after exchanging one last look with Felicity and throwing a wink at her sister.

Absentmindedly, as Felicity watches Nyssa's retreating back she wonders if maybe its a good thing that Nyssa only takes on the dauntless-born kids. She'd break the others by fear alone. But then again, Felicity knows that's not right - or fair, actually. There are far worse things that can happen to their initiates than Nyssa's harsh training methods could ever possibly hope to be. Because Nyssa is unbending, sure, and she has a zero tolerance for mistakes if you don't start correcting them after the second time she points them out; but she doesn't encourage cruelty.

Unlike others.

Felicity keeps her eyes straight ahead, doesn't give into the impulse to look around.

Isabel isn't here, but still - keeping her thoughts to herself is an art form. She wouldn't have survived so long if she didn't practice all of the time. Even when there's nobody around watching. ( _there's_ always _someone around watching. She knows that better than most_ )

She steps in front of the transfers, looks at them one by one.

"Eyes forward, initiates." she reminds them, her voice low but echoing around the corridor. all their eyes snap to her face. "This is your first day, and it's the only one you'll get to get used to this place before training starts, so adapt fast. Most of the time I work in Intelligence and Control, but for the rest of your training, I'll be one of your instructors. My name is Four."

Her voice comes back to her ears clear and steady, conversational. She knows she has a deep voice for a girl and anyway, she doesn't need to shout. They're in that phase where the quit of shock hasn't left them yet. She's not imagining the slight bored tilt of it. It's the only way she knows to make herself sound relaxed.

Lance - blonde and eyes vivid even there in the semidarkness - frowns at her, tilts her head. "Four? Like the number?"

Felicity could almost smile. Of course a Candor one would be asking all the questions and _of course_ the Candor asking the questions would be Lance. Those two were born for Dauntless, but where Laurel used to be simply put, a force to be reckoned with, Felicity can already tell that Sara is going to be more of a smartass.

That one needs nipping at the bud, in Felicity's opinion, before Isabel comes across it and starts doing nipping of her own.

"Exactly like the number." Felicity responds calmly. Her eyes sharpen on Sara's blue ones. "Is there a problem?"

"Nope."

"Good. I'm going to show you the Pit, which you will one day learn to love. It will-"

"Aren't you a bit small to be our instructor?"

Felicity stops again, irritation crawling on millipede legs up her spine, but she hardens against it. She feels the stillness working its way into her body, coiling her muscles.

She had hoped that _for once_ , she wouldn't have to go through this particular pit-stop, but at least this year it's happening sooner rather than later. She's not surprised though: people routinely mistake size for power and it's kinda sad really, the lack of imagination of it all. But where most of the times Felicity is happy to be underestimated, because - though it's not a very Dauntless way of going about it - it always ends up working in her favor, that doesn't really work for an instructor. People need to respect you to learn from you. And thought Felicity would be within her rights to say fuck it and hand them over in a hand-basket to Isabel like little idiot lambs to the slaughter, doing a half-assed job of anything grates against her nerves and her every perfectionist compulsion.

So she stops and eyes Sara Lance in the face, takes a step towards her until they're almost nose to nose, her lips twisting in an expression that probably feels more like the press of a cold blade against skin than an actual smile. She knows it does because the proof of it is in the way Lance's face falls. Candor always make it harder for themselves in the beginning. Their incessant mouths get them into trouble without knowing how to get them out.

"You're small too, Lance." Felicity says softly. "I wonder how you plan to survive here, if that's your first misgiving."

Lance grits her teeth but does say anything.

Without moving away or giving Lance space, Felicity eyes the tall boy behind her in Amity yellows. He's the biggest one of the group, his shoulders wide, his bronze skin even more lively against the earthy tones of former faction.

Perfect.

" _You_ , step forward." He knows that she's talking to him. He's nervous – it shows in the way he adjusts his glasses "Let's teach your Candor friend a lesson, shall we."

"I really don't want to, though."

Felicity's lips twitch. She bites back that smile. Not the time.

"You'll do it anyway…" And then, more insistently. "Step forward or I'll step forward to you. You'll like that even less, I promise."

He takes a deep breath and squares his shoulders, does as he's told. The other initiates making room for them in their midst. Felicity calculates his body and muscular mass the boy moves, thinks about how much force she'll need to exert so that she makes her point but does needlessly hurt him. He must be between 18 and 20, this one. It's hard to tell these days. It's not as rare as it used to be for people to wait those two available years after finishing school, before they are divided in their permanent factions.

Felicity wouldn't know anything about that.

"What's your name, initiate?" she asks quietly.

The transfer squares his shoulders. "Michael Holt."

"Take another step towards me, Michael Holt."

He does. The corridor is dead quiet. She can feel their eyes pressing against her skin like a touch.

"Glasses off. Put your right foot forward. Hands in front of your face, like this." She demonstrates for him. He tries to copy. His stance is all wrong, his feet locked too tight, his body exposed and even half his face. He has no conception of his own body or how to move it for maximum damage. It's the height of power imbalance and doing anything to him right now is tantamount to bullying, but experience has taught her that this moment is inevitable, though she can see by her incessant fidgeting that that Lance already regretting ever opening her mouth. Betting on Sara to be as inherently fair as her sister was a bit of a leap, but it turns out Felicity was right: Sara doesn't like other people getting punished for her fuckups.

Too bad.

"Look, I'm the one that…" Lance starts. Felicity turns before she can finish that thought.

"You're the one that opened her mouth." Felicity snaps. "And right now you're the one that needs to learn there are consequences to that."

She moves faster than any of them can track – grabs Holt's arm and pulls him over her back , throwing him over her shoulder and making him land back-first on the ground, shoving the breath out of him. He's gasping before he even registers how he ended up smacked on the pavement.

Felicity's not even breathing differently and maybe that more than anything makes all the initiates take a step back from her. She walks to Holt and crouches down in front of him as the whispers erupt around them.

"Everything alright there?"

He nods with a grimace. "I don't think anything's broken." He wheezes out.

"Nah, your first day is not the time for broken bones." Felicity allows a small lopsided smile and winks at him. "That comes later."

The boy winces but when she extends a hand to him, he takes it without hesitation. Felicity pulls him up to his feet easily.

"First lesson you will learn from me." She says as she faces the initiates again. "Size isn't always a measure for strength. Second lesson..."

Felicity comes to stand in front of Sara Lance again, eyes at their flattest, her face impassable.

"If I wanted to be around candor smart mouths, I would have joined their faction. Interrupt me again, and it'll be _your_ ass they'll be scrapping off that floor. Understood?"

Her voice falls flat and almost toneless in the newly created silence, but Sara Lance nods.

"Good."

Felicity turns, with just one gesture of her hand to indicate to the initiates to follow her and makes for the dark mouth of the corridor without waiting for them.

She's already tired of this. Just 10 more weeks, she tells herself as she walks. Ten more weeks to finish off this class of Initiates and then she's through.

She doesn't even know if she'll make it to ten weeks honestly. From all the things that she's seen, and especially because of the weight of the eyes that are always, always, at the back of her head, she really thinks she might have to leave before that


	3. Coward

She walks them through the Pit, the Chasm, with the fast rushing water beneath (can't really help wondering whose body they're going to find at the bottom of it this year, but that's a morbid thought, even for her), the dormitories and the bathroom. And yes, she does in fact relish the looks on their little faces when they see that. It's a bit petty that she smacks her shoulder hard on Sara Lance's and Oliver's too, as she passes, but so what. She's always been petty.

She finds Shado in the Pit, already piling food on her plate.

"How did first day go?"

Felicity scowls. "I think I'm gonna end up strangling a Candor this year."

Shado rolls her eyes. "You say that every year."

"Yeah but this one's a Lance. I mean it this time."

Shado chuckles in her cup as Laurel's head snaps in her direction, thundering frown on her face. "Hey!"

"What?"

Laurel narrows her eyes at Felicity but then the stern expression gives way to a brilliant smile. "I know Sara's a smart-ass and she'll probably have trouble learning to do as she's told but isn't it great that she's Dauntless! I missed her." She ads, more quietly and clearly meant just for Felicity's ears.

The muscles on Felicity's shoulders bunch up regardless. She wants to tell Laurel to keep those kind of thoughts to herself when they're in the middle of the Pit like this. 'Faction before blood', remember? But then again Laurel would probably roll her eyes at her. Sometimes - times like this, for instance - her paranoia makes Felicity feel the crushing weight of her loneliness more acutely than ever.

"So what are you going to do after you're done with this year's initiates. Slade will want an answer soon, you know."

Felicity hunches over her food even more. Yeah, she knows.

"I haven't decided yet." She says instead. Proof enough that she was never meant for Candor: she lies all too easily and all too well, sounding like she believes it even to her own years. That's the easiest way to lie, in her opinion: you have to believe even a small part of it, to make other people believe it.

To her left, Shado is very carefully eating her salad, mouth full so that she doesn't have to join this conversation. Felicity tries to imitate her by stuffing her face with beef.

Knowing Laurel, she has a vague but probably correct idea of where this is going, and she knows that she won't like it.

"I don't get why you keep refusing him." Laurel says, almost predictably. "I mean, I get that you like working in the control room. And that you like to lead almost as much as you like to follow-" Shado snorts in her drink at that, and Felicity rolls her eyes, pushing at her with her shoulder just enough to make her rock to the left a little. "But when you're offered a position in the leadership, that's something else."

Laurel leans in, face suddenly serious and her eyes sharp. "You could make a real difference, you know. With you as a voice in the Dauntless council, we wouldn't have to rely on people like Isabel to speak for us and make the decisions."

"Laurel!" Felicity snaps, spine going straight with pricking awareness.

"What, it's true."

"It doesn't matter if it's true." Felicity says, deliberately slow.

"It does matter, Four!" Laurel insists. "I've seen the program for this year's initiation! That woman is not the kind of Dauntless I want to stand for. She shouldn't be within 500 feet of the initiates, but she gets to train them her own way. Things would be different if it was you in her place, steering things."

No. No they would not. She'd thought that way too, a couple of years ago but she'd been proven dead wrong. But instead of saying that , Felicity takes a deep breath, praying to the silent god above that she might have the strength to keep her voice low and unaffected.

"Laurel… you're going to let me eat my food in peace, or I'm going to move someplace else where I can do that without your voice in my ear. Okay?"

Laurel grits her teeth so hard that the muscles of her jaw strain and tick. She shoves her plate away from herself.

"Fine. Have it your way." She gets up but then thinks better of it and leans in, one hand on the middle of the table as she speaks. "You know, there might come a day when something terrible happens that you could have prevented, and on that day you'll wish you had taken a stand for something that matters."

Her words hurt right where Felicity is most tender and Laurel probably knows that. It's her specialty: cutting through the bullshit and digging her fingers right where she knows it most hurts. But at least, Felicity notes absently, she has the forethought of keeping her expression neutral, and her voice low.

"…I never thought I'd see the day when the only Dauntless in recorded history with just four fears acts like a coward."

Laurel's voice is barely above a whisper, but Felicity hears her clear as a bell. Felicity looks up just in time to see Laurel register the effect of her words, the hurt she caused vibrating between them, alive in Felicity's eyes in a way that Laurel recognizes. But she grits her teeth against saying anything else, and Felicity knows that she's not going to get an apology anytime soon. Her face hardens with that knowledge, eyes going cold with anger.

Laurel doesn't hang around for it to evolve into something else though, and for that Felicity is grateful. She signs and stabs her beef a little more roughly than necessary.

"Don't." Shado warns, her voice low and almost right by Felicity's ear. "Just don't go there. Eat. We have rounds and then patrol. You'll need it."

Felicity nods and takes another bite. It tastes like ashes in her mouth but she pays that no mind. She's gotten good at giving her body what it needs and ignoring the rest. It's what got her through her own initiation, years ago.

Well, that's not quite right. Shado is what – who - got her through her own initiation, just like she gets her through the difficult times now. Felicity glances to her left, where Shado is picking up another roll and chewing at it carefully.

"She doesn't understand. She can't." Shado says as she turns to look at Felicity in the face, dark eyes calm and deep. "And you can't change her mind about some things. You know this."

Felicity looks away.

Yeah, she knows. Doesn't mean it hurts any less.

She never thought she would be making friends in Dauntless. Never thought she even knew how, really. To this day, the mechanics of it are a bit of a mystery to her. If Shado hadn't taken her under her wing two years ago, Felicity would have kept being the Stiff that was the youngest ever to transfer; the weird girl who spent all day in the training room and her evenings in the fear landscape and back again. She has no idea what would have happened to that girl, if she really would have snapped and finally shattered into a thousand pieces.

It would have been ironic that she'd survived years in her father's house without showing the cracks, and that they should finally start to corrode her in the one place where he couldn't reach her.

Felicity doesn't know. She doesn't know what would have happened and in the long run it doesn't matter because whatever Shado saw in her, it made her reach out and drag Felicity out. To take a breath, play a game, make some friends. Friends like Laurel, and Nyssa. Shado herself.

Friends that may have not saved her life, but they sure made that life into something that Felicity thought might one day be worth living. Friends like Laurel, who are in fact right… but being right is not enough. She's not willing to risk her life on it. She's not. She might be a Stiff beneath the black clothes and heavy make up that sits on her face like the mask that it is, but she was always too selfish for it. She doesn't want to die, fighting for a change that cannot happen. Not right now.

Because Laurel doesn't see it, but Felicity can: that deep wide chasm that she keeps dangling over, the fire red brimstone beneath. There is a storm coming, and a single person standing in front of it is not going to make the difference. Not even if that person is a Divergent.

Especially not then.

But these are all things that Felicity can't tell Laurel. Because deep down, though they are friends, Felicity doesn't trust her. She doesn't trust anyone. Not really. It's against her nature


	4. Inevitable

Everything Isabel does and says suggests easy familiarity, but Oliver rakes his eyes over the hard line of Four's shoulders, the careful pacing of her breathing and the way she's gripping her knife and fork so hard it's leaving impressions on her palms - and he begs to differ. They're not friends, no matter how gratingly cheerful Isabel sounds and how inherently bored Four looks.

They might be enemies, but maybe that's going too far. Rivals? Something. Though if you ask Oliver, it's more than that. It's in the words beneath the words, that make up a whole new language between them that he doesn't seem to understand, but can't help noticing it's there. It's about who Four is - and how she manages to look so unassuming, until she's staring at you full in the face and meaning it.

Her eyes are like it's own force-field - they give her looks the kind of weight that makes him feel unbalanced, before a hint of amusement makes it's way in her expression. (they're so dark he can't tell if they're blue or gunmetal grey.) He doesn't look away: doesn't want to be weak in front of her - doesn't want to be weak, period! - but tension still makes his skin prickle, and as heat starts to crawl up his neck, he finds himself wondering what the hell will happen when that tension breaks.

What happens is that her dark-painted lips curve up into the smallest smile Oliver has ever seen. 'Careful' is all she tells him to be. And even though his insides drop like they're suddenly made of lead, he can't help but like the deliberate way she says his name. Slow and careful, like it matters.

Maybe here he will learn to make it so that it does.

O

It's kinda funny to her now, the weariness of people who are twice her size and even older than she is. She wouldn't make fun of them for being cautious after being a shrew to them all morning, but still – it is a bit satisfying.

They sit next to her: the first jumper, (why do you pretend you don't remember his name? you never forget anything, you know his name, say it! Oh, shut the fuck up!) Lance, the tall one from Amity - Holt - and another boy who looks wide enough in the shoulders to take on a whole doorway. Well, at least they won't have too many problems in the physical part of the initiation. Felicity keeps from glancing at Lance as that thought skims her brain. She'll have to teach her a few things on her nights off - same as Shado did for her. If lance can learnt to keep her mouth shut, that is. Because it It would be a shame if she were to be kicked out just because Isabel prefers ruthlessness to honor. (not to mention Laurel would pop a vein or something...)

From the corner of her eye, Felicity can see Oliver glancing at her every now and then even as his friends start start laughing and teasing, talking about their old factions. Felicity tightens her grip around the mug, the warmth of the coffee inside staining her palm. She wants to tell them to stop. That they're Dauntless now and they should act like it, and not talk about their old factions all the time. That it's dangerous if they do.

Instead she snaps at them. Using the same words that swirled in her head, kinda. Well... ok, so it sounds like she's threatening them, but at least they get the point and move on to the next topic.

Which is lucky for them, because in that moment the hall falls into tense silence and Felicity doesn't have to turn to know who it is that entered the room. It's so quiet that you could hear a pin drop. Felicity resists the urge to get up and walk away, because she knows without even needing to look that Isabel will head her way the moment she spots her black head among the crowd.

"Who is that?"

Felicity looks over at Lance, her whisper not quite as quiet as the blonde might make it. She's staring at Isabel. Four pair of eyes turn to her.

"Her name is Isabel. She's a Dauntless leader."

Oliver's eyes turn from Isabel to hers, a tiny frown pulling his eyebrows together under his overgrown hair.

"But… she's so young. She's like… what? Twenty?"

Felicity just shakes her head. She wants to say 'so what, I'm even younger'. Wants to point out that there are not that many older people around, even. All it takes is one look around this place to get how it works.

Instead she gives the barest bones of an answer.

"Age doesn't matter here."

Felicity looks up to meet Oliver's look and she's surprised for a moment how the intensity in his eyes roots her on the spot, into a stillness that she feels all the way down to that part of her that is always buzzing with hyper-awareness, deep in the marrow of her bones. And it should be strange really, that when under the scrutiny of most people she buzzes like a live wire, but right now in this moment, she feels none of that discomfort, even though he's looking at her like he just figured out her thoughts and wants to ask her why.

But exactly then Oliver looks over her head and whatever he sees makes him straighten, just like it makes Lance turn to her food and the other two boys avert their eyes.

Felicity knows what they've seen: Isabel probably spotted her and is heading her way. She knows what the initiates see when they look at Isabel. Someone willow and beautiful, but cold, her eyes dark and piecing. And it's not really her wiry muscles that make her look menacing, or the tattoos wrapped around her arms, or even the piercings on both her eyebrows and her lip. It's the look in her eyes. You can tell by her eyes that she is merciless.

Isabel takes the seat just to her right that Shado emptied not ten minutes ago.

Why didn't I leave with her?

She offers no greeting and neither does Felicity. They both know this game: they've been playing it a while now. Isabel's eyes slam against the side of Felicity's face like a force that keeps trying to push her head to the side, but Felicity just keeps chewing carefully and takes another sip of her coffee, eyes forward, not acknowledging Isabel's presence at all. Any form of acknowledgment would be giving in, submitting, and while it may be true that Felicity is very weary of the creature sitting to her right, she is also proud - she'll break before she lets Isabel know the effect she has on her. It's something that may end up killing her one day, but that day is now today.

"Well, aren't you going to introduce me?"

Felicity follows Isabel's eyes, where they have landed on Oliver and Sara. They both look like cats caught in the pantry.

Learn not to look so guilty.

To Oliver though, she wants to scream to learn to do his thinking quietly. His brain is turning so furiously she can hear it from where she's sitting.

"That's Oliver and Sara. Those two are Michael and John." Felicity says tonelessly. Her own voice sounds calm to her, bored even, but there is no trace of that in her body. She feels so tense her shoulders are starting to ache. Relaxing in the face of danger is an art that Felicity hasn't learned to master no matter how hard Shado has tried to teach her.

Isabel leans in a bit, looking across from Felicity to all four of the initiates. Catches their gazes like mousses in a trap. Her lips stretch in a cold smile.

"Candor and Erudite. Cool. I'm surprised Amity even made it this far." She says, derisive note twisting her words like knives, making the initiates squirm and look away. None of them says anything, though Felicity notices that for all his discomfort and tension, Oliver doesn't look away. Isabel holds his eye for a moment, and then turns to Felicity. "No Stiffs this year?"

Felicity snorts.

"I'll see you in training, initiates." Isabel says and it sounds like a promise of violence. Felicity is aching to get up, to move, dosomething, but she locks her knees and starts cutting her meat into even smaller pieces before she takes the bites.

Stop. Stop being obsessive! Just eat the damn thing!

"So what have you being doing lately, Four?"

Felicity shrugs. She hates that carelessly relaxed note in Isabel's voice. Hates how much it grates against her senses.

"Nothing much."

"Slade has been looking for you. He tells me he keeps scheduling to meet and you don't show up. Asked me to figure out what's going on with you."

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck! She knew she shouldn't have bailed that last time. She knew it! But there's only so many times you can say no to Slade before it becomes dangerous and Felicity crossed that number a while ago. But the real problem she's facing at the moment is not that - not now, not here. The problem is that this isn't really about Slade and what he's been asking her. Its about Isabel being being here, poking around because of it.

Felicity knows when someone's fishing for information when she sees it, no matter how sly Isabel's Erudite brain tells her she's being.

Maybe she is being sly though. Felicity know that she can't help but answer her in a straight way now and confirm whatever suspicion Isabel has about why Slade has been asking for her.

"Tell him I'm satisfied with the position I currently hold."

"Oh, so he wants to give you a job?"

The surprise in Isabel's voice is fake. It makes her voice sound as plastic as her expression probably looks.

"So it would seem." Felicity says while looking straight ahead. She hasn't glanced at Isabel in the face once. She doesn't want to. She doesn't need to.

"And you're not interested?"

Felicity chews on her bite of salad and cuts one of the potatoes on her place into smaller bites. "I haven't been interested for two years."

Isabel laughs, low and smoky in her throat. The sound dances on the back of Felicity's neck and down her arms, pricking.

"Well, let's hope he gets the point."

Isabel gets up and walks away and the tension that had been knotting up the muscles of Felicity back drains a little more with every foot of distance between them. From the corner of her eyes she sees Oliver slouch.

He'd been listening in to their conversation the whole time. Others were too, probably, maybe the whole table had been listening, but Oliver didn't try to make a secret of it.

Felicity glances at him again. He's looking at her with those eyes of his. It's a strange blue, a kind of sleeping, distant color. Like it's just waiting to spark to life, the moment he looks at you.

She shakes her head. Yeah, not her day, this one.

"Are you two friends?"

Did we look like friends?

But she can't say that. And she can't say no.

"We were in the same initiation class." A non-answer answer. Her father would have scowled at it. (that is a thought that almost make her flinch bodily. She hates it when he pops in her thoughts uninvited. Hates it) She thinks to leave it at that, but then she meets Oliver's eyes again and there is something there… something that makes her want to warn him. Him and his friends. If there is one like her in their midst… "She transferred from Erudite."

The moment she says it though, she regrets it. It wouldn't mean anything to him – not when he just shed his own blue coat not 30 minutes ago. Not when most people don't even think Divergents are real to begin with.

But then Felicity sees those blue eyes of his light up and she thinks 'maybe it does mean something to him.'

"Are you a transfer too?" He leans in a bit, closer to her, so read to ask, to know. Typical. "Or were you dauntless-born?"

Felicity stares at him hard in the face, drilling her eyes into his. For one, very short-loved moment, she doesn't really know what to do. it's a little bit like touching the ground with the tips of her toes but not really being sure that it's there or if it's just her imagination. So she keeps staring at him unblinking, the way she knows tends to make people uncomfortable. She expects him to look away, it's a prerogative. She's been told her eyes are like murder when she stares like this… but he doesn't. The tiny hair on his arms straightens with tension and his expression shutters down, guarded, but he doesn't look away.

Dauntless indeed.

"I thought I made my stance on asking too many questions clear earlier." Felicity says, voice low, enunciating carefully. "Do I have to deal with you too now, as well as the candor one?"

Oliver blinks rapidly. "Must be because you look so approachable." He says, trying to make it sound like but his voice comes out a bit too thick to be totally nonchalant. "You know, like a mountain lion."

She can feel the smile wanting to come up. It actually makes the corner of her mouth twitch for a moment there. He's got nerve, she'll give him that. Maybe this one will be the Erudite transfer that doesn't turn cruel halfway through the Dauntless training.

Maybe.

But he won't go anywhere if he keeps that smartass attitude.

"Careful, Oliver." She says softly before she gets up. She knows he hears her – it makes his spine straighten.

She's not far enough to miss Sara Lance's fiercely hissed accusation when it comes. "You have a death wish or something?"

Felicity smiles to herself as she walks away.

Or something – that's the answer.

Hours later, cooped up in the Hub, she goes through the test results of all their initiates this year, with the help of a little refined hacking that the Erudite won't notice, and she sees that Oliver Queen's test results were taken by Shado, and that she entered them by hand because there was a problem in the system.

Felicity feels her pulse start to thunder beneath her breastbone.

His results were textbook Erudite, apparently.

It takes one look shared with Shado across her work space to unload the truth between them, like a leaping pile of stinking shit that neither would be able to hide.

"You know." Shado says simply as she cleans the tattoo gun with practiced movements.

Felicity closes the door carefully and takes off the jacket, takes a seat. She's going to end up with more ink than skin on her back if they keep doing this. Not that she cares, but whatever.

"Yes, I know." Felicity admits quietly. She wants to scream it, rage because of it, but she can't. This wasn't supposed to happen again. She couldn't do this again.

"You have to watch out for him." Shado states calmly, the tattoo gun coming to life with a hum. Felicity closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.

"You know I can't." I'm leaving, and you know that.

But she doesn't have to say that one out loud. They both know.

"Well, then you'll just have to stick this one out to the end."

This one. And the last one. And the one before that. How many more? There were three Divergent Initiates last year and only one of them made it out alive. Of the other two, one kissed the bottom of the Chasm and the other disappeared completely. Felicity has barely been escaping notice herself as it is and there is a good chance she won't be able to keep doing that for long, with the way Isabel has been breathing down her neck, lately, hungry eyes always alert for any sign that Felicity might finally step up and take what power she has gathered from under her.

She hates it when the lessons of her origin faction prove true, but she can't help it: power really does belong with the people that don't want it. Anyone else and it turns them into starving beasts.

She can't be food for this animal though. She can't! Not won't. There's a fucking difference!

Just like she can't actually say any of that out loud.

"You're worse than Laurel sometimes." Is what Felicity ends up murmuring into her arms as Shado starts to paint over the faded lines of her old tattoos, marking the signs of the five factions that she has inked down her spine.

"Yes, I suppose that's what it would seem like." Shado says, sounding completely engrossed in her work. It makes Felicity clench her fists.

Laurel at least has a reason for being this way, for demanding so much. But Shado knows better. She should know better, because asking Felicity to look out for another divergent and keep him safe is tantamount to making her strand the line between suicide and murder. You don't ask an abnegation-born idiot things like this, damn it, because they just might do it. Felicity can already feel it: that tiny voice in there, beneath all the black clothes and the ink, whispering at her: you have to help him. You cant just leave him for the wolves, you can't. You weren't left for their sharp teeth. You have to help him.

Fuck!

"It's going to be easier for him than it was for you. He's from Erudite, his parents are good friends with Waller, I hear. They're not going to want to look at him too closely."

Felicity snorts.

"Like the Wall gives a shit about family friends."

Shado pauses, lets out a slow breath. "No, I suppose she doesn't. Let's just wait and see, shall we."

There isn't going to be much waiting or seeing involved, in Felicity's opinion. But then the memory of his eyes comes to mind, so alive and so stubborn. 'No, just Oliver.' And she hides her face between her arms with a long sigh.

Oh, fuck…

Sometimes she really hates the way her brain is wired


	5. Contact

It's strange, Oliver thinks as he looks over at his shoulder at her.

She's so quiet; the most remarkable think about her is how self possessed she always looks. How careful; as if every movement, from the twitch of her lips to her every step, is calculated. Like she doesn't waste energy on anything that is not essential. If Oliver could think of a word for her it would be 'warrior'. It's all he can think of when he looks at her - just like when he looks at Isabel, all he can think about is 'cruel'.

But despite that, he doesn't dread her the way Sara and Curtis do. The way everyone seems to be afraid of Isabel, for instance. Oliver is weary of Isabel too, but she and Four couldn't be more different, in his eyes.

And earlier today, when she'd come close and spoken to him, even though his insides had felt like someone stole and them filled them with lead before bringing them back, he'd never been afraid that she'd hurt or humiliate him. He'd had to jump around in place and shake off the sensation of her hand pressing against his middle for a couple of minutes though. That was a different kind of dread, one that he'd never actually felt around another person, until he met her eyes - even so far as that first day over the rim of the net after he jumped. There was just something about her, but like all else about her, there was no pointing his finger at it and separating from the whole in any clear, careful way.

"She freaks me out." Sara mutters when she's sure that Four is far enough, adjusting Tiana's stance, showing her how to keep her elbows tucked in.

Oliver just shrugs.

"I mean did you see her this morning?" Sara leans in even further, her voice dropping to a whisper. "You think she would really have shot Sebastian?"

Oliver raises one eyebrow at her, can't really help the smile. "Maybe." Though he really doesn't think so. "And what a loss that would have been."

Sara snorts inelegantly and goes back to punching her bag hard, throwing her whole body into it, just like Four told her to, earlier. Oliver steals one last glace, and almost gets whiplash turning away when he finds she's watching him too. As he throws his punch the way she taught him though, he smiles.

o

She feels heavy and unrested the next morning. The mirror told her that she looked exactly like every morning, but her eyes had been rimmed red so she'd gone even more heavy with the black eyeliner today. They itch now, but she knows it's not because of the make-up. It's that particular feeling that makes her think the inside of her eyelids actually turns to sandpaper when she doesn't get enough sleep. Not exactly a foreign feeling, but not exactly welcome either. Still, she feels more alert because of it, as if her body is making up for the fact that she feels tired.

Shado had given her a look that only lasted a second longer than usual at the Pit, before looking away.

It had made Felicity feel naked.

It's good to know that she has at least one person that knows her well enough to pick up the small changes nobody else notices, even when they're as transparent as she can make them. But she can't really help it when it sparks apprehension too, even as the simple action of eye-contact pieces her bubble of isolation. Because yes, she is not alone. But what if other people can tell too?

Alone is lonely and aching, but it's safer. It's easier to control and maintain.

That's not important right now though, Felicity decides as she walks by the line of initiates standing in single line in the cold morning air.

"Initiation is divided into three stages. We will measure your progress and rank you according to your performance in each stage. The stages are not weighed equally in determining your final rank, so it is possible, though difficult, to improve your rank over time."

Isabel had scared them all this morning, with the threat of cuts hanging over their heads like axes about to drop on them. It's supposed to make them more competitive, according to the new policy of their leadership. More fierce. All Felicity thinks is that it will make them afraid.

She walks by Oliver and presses a gun into his hands without looking at him, same as she did with the others. She watches the initiates handle their weapons. None of them have ever held a gun in their hands before and it probably feels foreign - as it should. This is the hardest part, for Felicity. getting it through these kids heads that this is not a game. That this is dangerous and that it will cost at least one of them their lives if they don't realize that soon enough. It irritates her when they try to make themselves look like naturals at it; their smiles irritate her, their boasting grates. It makes this look like a game, which is not and it just makes them looks stupid for it. But she's never said that aloud to anyone, because all those people standing in front of her now… they're just kids. The oldest of them is at most twenty, the youngest this year eighteen.

You were younger. People gave you shit for it all the time.

Yeah… but she's not people. She chooses not to be, after all. Today she's just in a bad mood, is all.

But then her eyes catch Oliver Queen, who still holds the gun gingerly, like it might bite his fingers, and doesn't even try to look like he likes the way it feels in his hand, and her mood lifts a little.

"We believe that preparation eradicates cowardice, which in Dauntless, we define as failure to act in the midst of fear." she turns and looks at all of them in the face one by one. "Which is what we will be preparing you for, in different ways." She walks as she talks, looking at them in turn. "Being Dauntless won't ever mean you'll be fearless. That's not the point. The point is to learn to control your fears."

"What does…" Sebastian Blood yawns through the words, eyes watering and Felicity feels the thread of that dark cloud tugging at her. "What does firing a gun have to do with bravery?"

Felicity flips the gun in her hand and presses the barrel against his wide forehead, the click of the bullet in the chamber as loud as an actual shot.

Sebastian freezes, yawn stuck in his throat, eyes wide and lips still parted.

"Wake the fuck up." She grits between her teeth, voice low, her controlled anger as sharp as a scalpel. "You're holding a loaded gun, you idiot. Act like it!"

Felicity moves the barrel of the gun up towards the sky and clicks the safety back on. She doesn't miss the way Blood's clear green eyes harden as she turns her back, and between herself and her own mind, she admits she's quite impressed his Candor mouth stays shut. But then again, it might be because he fears a bullet.

"And to answer your question: the more prepared you are, the less likely you will be of shitting your pants when the time comes to act. Now pay attention."

She turns to face the target, feet apart in shoulder width, handle of the rifle against her right shoulder. The whole of her concentration focuses on the target until the sight of it fills the entire span of her vision. She takes one deep breath, Nyssa's voice steady in her ear, reminding her how to breathe.

She exhales - and fires.

Dead center.

She lines the initiates up after and tells them how to stand, how to hold the gun, how to aim. Both eyes open, you see twice as well. Try not to close them, don't lock your knees.

They start shooting and half of Felicity brain can't help but calculate the waste of arsenal as more than three thirds the bullets end up anywhere but in their targets. But that's fine. She has a mean inner voice when she's cranky but that doesn't make that voice right. Nobody was born good at this and that is the point of this whole initiation. This - all this training - it's unnatural, and her job is to drag them through them until they forget that fact.

She walks behind them, correcting their stance in low voice and trying to help them get better.

She stops behind Oliver's back, watches him shoot. He hasn't hit the target once, even peripherally. Sara teases him a little for it and it only ends up making him more determined.

Felicity waits, holds the impulse to give him a few pointers and watches him shoot a few more times. Watches him adjust his grip, his stance, trying to find his balance, a way to hold the lethal weapon in his hands in a manner that he might master it, instead of just shooting with it blindly.

It's… interesting, watching him maneuver through the foreign and find a way to hold on and get comfortable with it. He's sloppy in the way of the inexperienced, but his determination is fascinating.

The next shot hits the edge of the target. So does the next one. and the one after that.

One corner of Felicity's mouth curls up. Good.

When he manages to hit the center of the target his smile is so brilliant that even at the other side of the lineup, watching over Lawton's head - who has been firing shot of dead-center shot with a talent that can only be called natural - Felicity finds herself blinking back at the sight of it. His cheek are flushed, his eyes awake and shining with triumph. And she can practically see it, the rush going through him at controlling something that can do such huge amount of damage.

She remembers the first time she got to shoot and hit the center of the target, and how alive she'd felt, how present. In control.

He high-fives with lance who's standing to his left and Felicity looks away.

o

Once they're in the Pit for lunch, she walks by the initiates' table and sits at the one parallel to them. She can't really miss the way Oliver keeps rubbing his hands together: she's trained herself to always be aware of everything – it's not really his fault that that makes her especially aware of him by consequence. His fingers are probably feeling like they're going to stay crocked forever. She knows exactly where he's hurting too, where his muscles are most tender. She remembers. her body does - though it hasn't hurt like that in some times. Her body remembers phantom pain more than most, Felicity thinks.

But that thought is an unwelcome one and her eyes rise from her plate, looking around for something to distract her, anything, from that train of thought.

She spots Sara Lance - she's easy to spot even in the crowded and dimly lit Pit: her hair is like a bright beacon, her wide smile an even louder one. By her side, Oliver stands out too - because she is so animated as she talks that his quietness by contrast seems especially noticeable. He's pushing his peas around in his place, eyes shuttered and thoughtful.

What are you thinking about, Oliver. Are you wondering if your divergence is stamped on your forehead? She had wondered about that, once. She' used to think, back when she chose, that her divergence was a piercing scream and everywhere she went people turned to look at her because it was so loud.

But it hadn't been her being a divergent that had made them look.

Oliver's divergence isn't stamped on his forehead either. Not yet. For a very strange, insane moment, she wishes she could go and sit by his side, touch his shoulder and tell him that it's ok, and his secret is safe, as long as he's careful about it.

It's such a foreign imagine elbowing its way into her imagination that she finds herself blinking furiously at it. Felicity has always known it makes her strange here, among people who tattoo themselves on the regular and have piercings everywhere and think nothing of contact, but she's always been weary of those kinds of displays and rarely has ever wanted to actually touch anyone. The barer truth would be that she doesn't like being touched at all and always views it with suspicion when people reach for her.

She shakes her head. Weirdo.

It's comforting calling herself that, rather than thinking too hard about why she is that way. She's too smart not to know, but knowing why a tooth aches doesn't make it better. And these are some things that she'd rather not think about. She thinks of them enough when she's in her never-changing fear landscape.

Still, she can't help one last glance over at the initiates table. She looks over just in time to see Sara turning to talk Oliver in the debate that she's been having with her friends for the lat ten minutes. Her words just seem to part around him like water does when one stands in the middle of a river. They don't reach him, not until Sara snaps her fingers in front of his face. He turns to her, eyes wide and startled, before he blinks that away and focuses on her actual words.

They talk for long moments, she watches the expression flit across their faces. What would it be like to be so open? They're all either as old as she is or even older on that table, she thinks as she looks from Oliver to Andy Diggle and his brother sitting side by side, to the other girl, Tiana. They all are so animated. It feels so utterly foreign to her.

The discussion brings them to try surreptitiously – without much result, actually - looking two tables over and for a moment Felicity things they're looking at her and she looks down on her plate, but they're not. She can feel it. She's always very aware when people look at her.

She follows his eyes to where two other initiates are sitting, kissing, and she looks away.

Years, and she's still not comfortable with public displays of affection like that. Laurel calls her stupid, and Shado calls her careless, but some things can't just wash away. They used to laugh at her, in her initiate class, and call her frigid. That is, until she learned how to throw a punch hard enough to knock someone's teeth out. They called her tough after that.

Funny how words change but never actually hide the shadow meanings they first carried beneath. It's like they accumulate and the ones that came before just hide in the shadows of the new ones, make their weight felt without actually being there to take the blame for it.

Or maybe that's just because Felicity isn't that good at letting things be forgotten. She's horrible at it actually. She knows how to move on – she's a pro at it - but she never forgets.

Maybe that's why she never quite learned how to forgive. Maybe this, and not her nature, like she sometimes thinks, is the reason why she struggles so hard to be kind.

o

"Line up" Felicity says as she walks, "one punching bag for each of you. The purpose of this is to prepare you to act; to prepare your body to respond to threats and challenges—which you will need, if you intend to survive life as a Dauntless."

She puts them all in a row, and together with laurel they demonstrate some of the basic forms.

"We will go over technique today, and tomorrow you will start to fight each other, so pay attention." She reminds them, though she shouldn't have to. "Those who don't learn fast, get hurt."

And is the most honest truth she can afford them.

She watches them practice, after.

The best one this year is Lawton, without a doubt. Even the older Dauntless are starting to call him Deadshot, which Felicity has to say it's an earned name. He's the best shooter she's ever seen. He's good at hand-to-hand too. Better than good. She can tell he's been practicing long before he stepped in Dauntless.

Good for him.

John Diggle is a natural at technique and whatever he has been doing with his life so far has granted him power, as well as a strong frame. He nails stance and movement almost immediately. Felicity spars him a good word of encouragement as she moves by.

Sebastian blood is tall and his frame could lend him strength in time, but Felicity holds back a curled lip of distain when she passes by him. He has all the points of a psycho in the making and though she knows it's supposed to be against the rules, she honestly hopes he flunks. They don't need any more of those at Dauntless. Curtis Hold on the other hand, has no idea what to do with his massive body - so Felicity guides him. She's not the best pick at teaching someone with such a different body type from herself, but the basics are the same for everyone and at this stage, they don't need more than that. Mick might take over for the more personalized fighting styles later… if Hold makes it.

Sara Lance doesn't need that much help either, Felicity is surprised to realize. She is small and slight, just like Felicity used to be, but there is a familiar fierceness about everything she does that makes Felicity want to smile at her. She doesn't, but she goes over and gives her a few pointer: use your elbows, use your knees until you develop a muscle mass. Use her body weight, turn her hips. Lance is uncomfortable all the way through and actually flinches when felicity reaches to adjust her stance. She just grits her teeth and ignores it.

Side by side with her, Oliver Queen is listening too. When Felicity catches his eye, the back of his neck flushes and goes back to punching his bag. His knuckles are already red, and he's breathing too hard. The run around the training area before she put them in line was supposed to teach them how to breathe. He's not learned his lesson that well but he's learned it better than Felicity did, once upon a time. He doesn't hold his breath at least - that's a good thing.

He has a trim figure, she notes as she looks at him up and down, hands crossed over her chest. He's tall and she can tell that he used to hit the gym on the regular by the definition of his arms the that his T-shit exposes. But his punches are nowhere near as powerful as they should be.

She steps closer to him and his next punch slips off the bag.

"You used to train before, didn't you."

It's not really a question.

He looks over, surprise showing in his eyes. He gives her a shallow nod and Felicity wonders why he feels he has to hide that. But then again, he probably feels like he has a lot to hide and can't really tell the difference between the safe secrets and the deadly ones.

Neither can she, really. Most of the time she holds herself together so tightly she thinks she might snap.

"Yeah. But that was for vanity, and so are your muscles. There's no real power behind them."

He blushes, high on his cheeks and frowns as he turns back to the punching bag. He really is a lot more silent than she expected him to be.

"You're going to need to learn how to build power in your frame. It's not about how much you can lift, though that helps."

"What is it about?"

"Training to do damage, instead of looking good." That gets a startled look out of him. "For now, remember that you to hold the muscles contracted. Your middle, here." she reaches out, touches the fingertips of her right hand to his abdominal and pushes, feels his muscles beneath the t-shirt contract at the pressure. "Use your body weight and turn your hips when you throw a punch. Don't punch from your elbow."

She steps around him as he nods, even as his eyes seem to look at her s intently that the discomfort it causes crawls up her neck in small sticky legs.

She has to resist rubbing the tips of her fingers together, after, as she walks away. They itch for a long while and she has to shake her hand a couple of times before she can actually think of touching someone else to correct their stance.

It doesn't feel the same and the thought grates. She's not comfortable with it in any kind of way


	6. Fight

It's strange, and many of his peers wouldn't agree on it probably, but when Four steps away from the training room, Oliver's nervousness doubles, as if their one safety-net is being pulled from under them. She doesn't do anything to really set herself apart from Isabel but it's not about words or even actions. The undercurrent between them is almost opposite. They're both dangerous and intimidating, they both look like violence wrapped in skin, but where one of them is ruthless without rules, the other is honorable. And it's like being presented with two different ways to be Dauntless.

The more time they spend in the training rooms, the more the difference starts being noticeable, until it becomes a piecing scream.

When Isabel offers to 'give Tiana a hand a hand' after she conceded on her fight with Helena, Oliver's spine straightens like a jolt of electricity jams through it. He feels like yelling at Tiana not to touch Isabel ever, as if she were a poisonous plant or something. It feels like the moment Tiana will touch Isabel, she's going to lose a hand or something.

As it happens, there's no loss of limb involved: Tiana ends up dangling off the Chasm instead.

Oliver isn't sure which one is worse.

o

Isabel's walk is distinctive – her steps are heavy because she wants to be noticed. Felicity knows other versions of Isabel's walk as well: when she's so quiet that she doesn't even disturb the shadows. But here she wants to be looked at when she enters a room.

"Are they ready for a real fight?"

Felicity scoffs. "Not even close."

Isabel shakes her arms at her sides, rolls her shoulders. Her voice resounds around the brick walls. "John Diggle - in the ring."

Felicity clenches her jaw tight as John steps in the ring and starts jumping up and down in place, loosening his muscles, eager to prove himself. He shouldn't be. Laws of predictability and years of living around Isabel tells Felicity that next to the biggest fighter in this class, their so called leader is going to put the smallest one, because that is how Isabel's brain operates.

"Lance." Isabel juts her chin towards the ring in front of her. "Time to fight."

Sara's eyes are determined as she steps in the ring, her bright hair pulled in a tight ponytail. The quiet anticipation in John's eyes dims immediately as he takes her in from head to foot. Felicity knows the reason behind his hesitation – it's probably one of the reasons why this fight is going to be such a delight for Isabel. Physically speaking, technique and experience aside, John is the strongest fighter of this initiation class… but he's kind. It's all over his face and sometimes when Felicity catches Isabel looking at him, she just wants to throw a wet blanket around his shoulders and protect him from the flames that he doesn't even notice are crawling about him.

"How long do we fight for?" John asks and even though his face is well schooled, his hesitation is in his voice and in the way he hasn't even fallen into his stance yet.

"Till one of you can't continue." Isabel responds, as if it's obvious.

Felicity steps forward, head to head with Isabel though the other woman is almost a head taller.

"Or till one of you concedes."

Isabel doesn't look away from John and Sara, as if Felicity isn't there at all.

"That was the old rules. According to the new rules, no one concedes."

Felicity turns her head barely, her voice even, eyes focusing somewhere on Isabel's chin. "You really wanna lose them on their first fight?"

"The brave never surrender." Isabel says, and to Felicity, it sounds like she's parroting something she doesn't understand fully.

"The brave acknowledge the strength of the peers by their side." Felicity reiterates evenly.

This standstill feels old and worn, but it's never gotten easier being in it. The divide between them couldn't be wider if they were standing at different sides of the Chasm and really, this is why Felicity has been refusing a leadership position two years in a row. She knows what she believes in, but there is no place for it in this new Dauntless that is shaping up.

"As I said, a true Dauntless never gives up." Isabel closes the argument with that. And it should be easy to leave it alone. It would besmart and Felicity is fucking smart. She is the smartest person in any given room most of the time, even though there aren't that many that know that - which is the way she wants it. She should be smarter than this, but sometimes… well, sometimes she is a lot angrier than she is smart.

"Lucky for you, those weren't the rules when we fought." Felicity says, voice so slow that only Isabel is sure to hear it.

Isabel's face hardens, her eyes go cold as she stares at the initiates.

"You'll be scored on this, so fight hard."

For a few moments all John and Sara do is walk around the ring, taking the measure of each other. Isabel huffs.

"I don't have all day." She snaps.

Sara lunges. John defends himself pretty well against her but that's all he does and once Sara snaps at him to fight back, he has to do just that. In a way… in many ways, actually, Felicity understands Sara perfectly. Not being taken seriously as an opponent is an insult that is almost as heavy as a punch to the face for someone who wants to be a part of dauntless. So John obliges and they actually fight. Sara does fight hard. She fights smart. But no matter what, she simply has too little experience to go against someone more than twice her size and win. John gets one good punch in and she's down.

She tries to scramble back up, stubborn as a mule, and John looks to Isabel first and then to Felicity, looking like he's waiting for them to call the fight off, but Felicity doesn't move, doesn't blink. A few feet away from her, Isabel checks her watch.

John huffs an angry breath.

"This is ridiculous! What is the point of beating her up? We're in the same faction!"

Sara grits her teeth and almost growls at him. She smiles and her teeth are bloody, her eyes alight like a torch has been turned on inside her skull.

Felicity knows that look. She's lived that rage. It's why she knows it won't take Sara very far, no matter how bright it burs.

"Oh you think it's that pointless do you? Fuck you!" Sara growls and then launches herself bodily against him, trying to do the most damage she can before he knocks her out.

Felicity lets go a slow breath, trying to control her reactions. She looks at John pushing Sara away and nicking at her like the perverted version of a sculptor chirping at a marble block and she feels the beginning of violence heating up her insides. She doesn't look away from the fight and the longer it goes on, the hotter the glare she is pressing against John Diggle's face grows. She's seen this happen before, and she hates it. Hates the way people are so quick to misunderstand emotions – how they are so slow to learn that sometimes what they think is kindness, translates on someone else's skin as slow cruelty and nothing more than that.

There is no world in which a hard beating would be considered kind, but ending inevitable pain as quickly as you can, must be better than this game that John is putting on, just because he's hesitant to knock out a girl.

That's not kind. That's selfish and thoughtless.

If he knew that girl would claw his eyes out of she could maybe he'd rethink his stance, Felicity thinks darkly.

"Stop playing with her and end it already!" She snaps, raising her voice for the first time since the newbies have laid eyes on her. It seems to take a few of them by surprise. Isabel smirks at her and raises a single eyebrow at her words, which makes Felicity's fists itch to slam against her perfect face.

Thankfully for all involved though, John Diggle takes her advice to heart and one hard hit to the jaw later, Sara Lance hits the ground hard and doesn't get back up.

Isabel watches Sara laying there for a couple of long moments, and Felicity watches Isabel - taking note of that hard glint in her eyes, that hungry shine of them that seems to never leave them when she's in the presence of someone weaker.

If Felicity needed one more reason to hate Isabel, this right now would be it.

Felicity moves towards the ring – reminding herself as she moves, to relax her shoulders and stop clenching her jaw. She hates it when she does that, and she does that all the time when she's on edge. This time she'd been clenching it so tight her whole face aches. She motions for Digg to come forward and help her carry Sara back to the infirmary. John lifts her, more gently than his big hands ever looked like they could be – he doesn't seem to need Felicity with him but just as she's about to step back to supervise the fights, Isabel reminds her of the rules: All initiates must be accompanied to the infirmary by at least one of their instructors to issue a formal report of the injury. Felicity's lips thin but she does what she has to. She doesn't look at anyone on her way out – especially not at Oliver, though she can feel his eyes pressing hotly against the side of her face.

Felicity's steps down the Dauntless corridors are fast, setting a brisk pace. Leaving the initiates alone with Isabel makes her nervous. She wishes that she didn't care but she does. It makes her feel irresponsible, like she's leaving kids alone with a babysitter who likes to sharpen knives.

She finishes with the report in record time.

"Stay with her until a nurse comes by to check him." She orders John firmly as she walks out.

* * *

Regret comes in many different tastes - like ice-cream. And just like ice-cream, it can make your head numb if you rush to swallow to much of it too soon.

When she first came to Dauntless and had her first try of ice-cream, Felicity experienced her first brain-freeze in 16 years of life. Even now she has trouble remember to eat slowly when it comes to mint chip, in particular.

The feeling is strangely similar though, to the one she's feeling now.

She left for fifteen minutes. Fifteen! She counted! And within that timeframe, Isabel managed to dangle someone over the Chasm.

'Dauntless never give up' That's what she'd said to them. And a small part of Felicity wonders, is she the one that has it wrong? Is this really the way it should be? After all, we're Dauntless – we're are the ones who are supposed to stand up for those who can't, the ones that are supposed to push past limits, do the things that others aren't able to do. We're supposed to be the rocks on which every danger breaks before it reaches everyone else. Felicity hates to admit it but Isabel is right on that: Dauntless should never give up, because in real life giving up would mean that the person shoulder to shoulder with me would die because of that cowardice.

But how right she is in the way she chooses to teach that lesson though… Felicity really has no answer for that. And sometimes she's glad that she can still question herself, despite how certain she is in her own mind. People who are unshakable are the most dangerous kind of people.

* * *

He has a tattoo peeking from his collarbone the next time she sees him. A sort of bird, inked in black on his skin. She wonders if he went to Shado to have it done, if she spoke of him of anything. She usually never does, unless she's sure of the person she's speaking to.

"When you stand in front of an opponent, you have to remember that no matter who they are, they are first and foremost a person and every person you will ever meet has a weakness. Finding it will help you win against them."

That's what she'd told them yesterday, and she hopes they can all remember that lesson today. Outside Dauntless, people think that theirs is the brainless faction, the brute strength one – but Felicity's experience alone stands as proof that that's not true.

Still, no matter how much they improve in the next few sessions of training, that's not enough to save Oliver from a hard beating when he is up against Sebastian Blood.

It's especially brutal because, though Oliver fights hard, violence doesn't seem to come naturally to him like it does to some of the others and this makes him hesitates at dealing it out. In real life, hesitation could cost him dearly, but here in training that wouldn't necessarily preclude a win. But he's not just fighting against anyone; he's fighting against Blood, who not only enjoys being able to inflict pain, but also actively takes pleasure on his opponents' misery. Against him, Oliver's strategy – or lack of it – gets him a lot more hurt than he can and should be able to afford.

Felicity – and most likely Oliver too – knows by the first five minutes that he's going to lose, and lose badly. He's already taken too many hits in too many places. But Oliver doesn't give in at any moment though, doesn't take the easy way out of pretending to be knocked out. She knew he wasn't going to do that, ever.

It's not pride, like many would probably think. It's resolve. He's a strange mix of determination and potential for power lingering just an inch below the surface in a quiet way that simply demands attention. Not really the kind of person that would never be happy to be tucked away in a safe spot and be content there, without even trying. If he wasn't like that, he wouldn't have spilled that drop of blood on those hot coals, even though his test gave him a Erudite result.

No, it's not pride, she thinks, as he takes the fifth hard punch to the jaw and shakes it off. He has plenty of that too, but it's not what drives him. It's fearlessness.

But she can't really bear witness to senseless, needless violence for much longer. It's never been a game to her - not ever, though people used to think it was, back when she was as vicious as she could be in a fight just to make it end sooner. (It became her calling card: the merciless one that will never cut anyone any slack. they never really understood her, but that was always ok with Felicity. she'd rather be misunderstood, than transparent.) Once it becomes clear that Oliver can't fight back anymore, but he won't stop getting up either, Felicity turns around and steps out of the training room, her heart beating so hard against her ribs and spine she feels like she's swaying a little as she walks. Because she knows what's going to happen and she can't stand watching it. She knows Blood would enjoy toying with him until Isabel got bored and told him to finish it.

Her palms sweat just at the thought of it.

She walks faster in the Pit's corridors and her hands shake, her vision blurs. Absently she wonders if she's having a minor panic attack, and it's really such a repeated experience that it's as if it's happening to someone else, even as her own heart flutters.

But as she finds a silent former in the pit's corridors and methodically lets herself shake apart and then pieces herself back together as if this were just another simulation, Felicity can't shake the bad feeling that lingers. A feeling that is more like a shadow over her every step, after that thought came to her as she watched Oliver get back up time and time again, even in a hopeless confrontation: 'you know who he reminds you of. You know. Stop pretending that you don't.'

Of course she knows. God, sometimes she wishes she could just forget, but that's impossible. She could no more forget that, than she could forget her own name.

Yes she knows. And that knowledge had dropped on her like a stone and made feel the chill of cold sweat down her spine. It grabs her by the throat and refuses to let go. She hates where it leads her, what is says about her. What it says about him! What it could mean for him.

Because even though she doesn't even know him, not really, not beyond what a careful eye on him could ever tell her, still the last thing she wants is for Oliver to end up like Tommy did.

* * *

Something changes – shifts imperceptibly – after that day.

Oliver ends up in the infirmary for a whole day, after his fight with Blood, and Felicity has to compile a list of at least 24 reasons why going to visit him would be a horrible idea. Most of the time she can hardly remember them but their existence helps keep the impulse in check. It feels a lot like being submerged in a full tank and suddenly the temperature of the water starts chancing. Where before there was just a vague warmth, now the heat is starting to feel threatening and just like she would feel the water against every inch of her skin and hair, and in the cling of her clothes pulling her down, she feels the change everywhere. In the way she looks at him, in the way she's a bit weary of him now, of how he makes her feel. Of the fact that he makes her feel, period. Makes her want to do and say things that she doesn't normally want to with other people. It's such a strange way to be, for her. She's never had to forcibly stop herself from talking to someone before. Never felt the impulse to over share. Self-preservation has never failed her in the past. The fact that it does now leaves her flailing for balance. Living with that change that she can't control makes her uneasy… because though she knows there is nothing good or safe about it, she doesn't really want to stop it either.

She tries to keep off her face the vicious satisfaction she feels when Blood gets beat up by Lawton on their next fight, but it's hard to contain it. The only thing that keeps her biting her lips from smiling at Blood's face hitting the mat hard is the fact that she is aware, still, that Isabel might be watching.

But it doesn't stop her from watching for him the day of their outing to the fence, even as she stands so close to the tracts that if she were to lean forward, the train might take her nose with it. When she sees him, at the end of the line, walking with a limp after Sara Lance, his face more black and blue than flesh-toned and his eyes swollen almost to the point of being shut, something inside her drops down, down, down - she feels it's absence all the way to the fence. She has to blink and clench and un-clench her hands several times to feel like herself again.

She pulls herself up into the moving train after Lance with an ease that comes from practice, grips the rail hand, plants her feet and extends her hand to help him up. He grips her arm just below the elbow, his hand warm and his fingers so long they wrap all around her forearm and then some. She pulls him up without much difficulty. He murmurs his thanks without looking at her.

She stands close to the open door after, watching the buildings and the tracks rush by her, half her body hanging out of it though her fingers are gripping the rails tight and her feet are planted firmly inside the cart. She wants to distract herself. She'd rather feel the sting of fear digging its teeth deeper into her as the height grows, than that painful contortion of her insides whenever she glances at Oliver's bruised face.

"Feeling ok there, Queen? No permanent damage, I hope? It would be a real shame to scar that pretty face of yours."

Felicity hears Blood's voice as if from a distance and she stiffens. A part of her had expected this. Blood's face is no better, but he's taken to calling Oliver names like 'pretty boy' and 'dollface' and stupid shit like that, just a get a rise out of him. It's what's he's trying to do now, as well.

Oliver's expression darkens and his hands clench into fists but before he can say anything, Sara's already there.

"Never mind his face, Blood. You should watch your head." she snaps, her smile slow and mean. "It would be a shame if Lawton managed to knock you out so hard even the last neurons left in your skull dropped outa your ears."

Blood's eyes harden but Felicity's not about to let this go any further.

"If I have to listen to your shit excuses of wit any longer, I'm throwing someone off this train." She warns evenly from where she's standing by the open doorway. She doesn't raise her voice despite the whipping wind getting louder as the train picks up speed, but they all get very quiet regardless. She turns around then, facing the moving landscape again, but even though peripherally, she can that that Oliver keeps sneaking glances at her. His eyes are as tangible on her as the wind is, whipping her clothes against her body.

What do you see when you look at me?

She's never wondered about it like this before. Not just for the sake of knowing, not without the shadow of danger present behind that question. But for the first time in what feels like ever, Felicity lets herself wonder about it, tries to see herself as he might see her. Always all in black, small and stern and unforgiving. Harsh and pale, with dark lips and dark eyes, never speaking unless it's to snap at them to shut it. Never with anything nice to say unless it's about their training.

She probably isn't that different from Isabel in his eyes. It's the way it should be – she's his instructor. He's not supposed to see her as a real person. The thought makes her throat burn regardless.

Damn it!

* * *

They're almost out of the city completely - the dilapidated buildings are gone, replaced by yellow fields and train tracks. Felicity's the first one to jump out of the train once the train stops under a yawning. The Initiates file out too and follow her to the wall. It stretches further than any of them can see, wrapping around the whole city, with high tension towers built on top of it and a barbed fence around them.

Past it, there's a cluster of trees, most of them dead, some green.

"Follow me," Felicity tells them as she leads them toward the gate, which is as wide as a house and opens up to the cracked road that leads to the city. "If you don't rank in the top five at the end of initiation, you will probably end up here," she explains as he reaches the gate. "Once you are a fence guard, there is some potential for advancement, but not much."

"What rank were you?" Blood asks. She supposes it's a sign that he still remembers what the cold barrel of a gun feels against his forehead that he waits for her to be done speaking before he asks that.

She looks levelly at Blood and says, "I was first."

"And you chose to do this?" Blood's eyes are wide and round and dark green, disbelief writing in almost innocent lines across his face and Felicity would believe it, if she hadn't seen the glee he takes at beating down people who are weaker than him. "Why didn't you get a government job?"

"I didn't want one," she tells him flatly. "Come on, let's move."

She guides them in the fields beyond the wall, tells them to stay close by.

She doesn't miss the way Oliver stays close to Sara and his friends, even as they mill about. Felicity feels the trickle of a foreign feeling at their closeness, but she holds on to gratefulness instead, because Sara Lance may be small, but she is the fiercest creature Felicity has met in a long while and if anyone tries to get at Oliver again, she will show them her teeth and a growl, the way she did before.

'I'm going to teach her how to win her next fight.' Felicity decides, and nods to herself shallowly. I'm going to teach her the same way Shado taught me.

…though she won't teach her any of the lethal techniques. Not that. Felicity doesn't want anyone knowing she can do that. That she's capable of it.

She remembers the look on Shado's face years ago, when she's snuck her arm around Isabel's throat and jerked her backwards, ready to tighten her grip and snap her neck. She'd never meant to kill her, not really. It had been just a fighting move, a way to end the match.

It's what Felicity tells herself every time. She doesn't remember how true it is anymore. In that moment she hadn't known anything but her own rage…

Either way, she doesn't want to see that look on another's persons face if she can help it. Nobody is supposed to know she is that ugly inside, nobody.

She lets them walk around a while, talk to the guards that guard the wall, lets herself relax a bit as she takes in the fields beyond, the green and yellows of them. She's always found them calming, even though she's never felt she could belong in a peaceful and joyful faction like Amity. She has too much war inside herself for that.

A loud shriek brings her back to the present and immediately she turns towards the sound, hand already going to where she keeps her concealed gun at the small of her back, but then she stops.

It's just a little girl, she notices, in a deep blue jacket, running through the fields as fast as a bat outa hell and straight into the middle of the Initiates, light brown curls streaking behind her. She jumps in Oliver's arms like it's nothing, like she expects him to pick her up and trusts him to do it without fail. Which he does, though he can't quite hide the grimace on his face when her tiny body impacts what must be his sore ribs. But the kid doesn't see it. She's holding on to him for dear life, skinny arms around his neck like a vice. And there's a secret smile on Oliver's face as he holds her back, her little feet dangling in the air, peace and longing arranging his bruised features into an expression she's never seen before.

Felicity finds herself blinking at the sight – her mind stunned into silence.

She keeps watching as he sets her down and crouches in front of her. Watches as he tries to smile, but can't quite manage it for long because it hurts. The kid reaches out, but he stops her hand before it touches his face. When the kid turns to scowl at something Digg says, Felicity sees her face. She looks a bit like him – they have the same eyes: wide and strong and stubborn as hell.

They're family, Felicity realizes. She must be his sister. There is no other way to read the look on his face, the way affection lights him up, softens everything about him.

Something inside her squeezes painfully so hard that she has to look away to be able to breathe again.

It's another five minutes before she kisses him goodbye over his left cheekbone – the one place where the bruises haven't managed to crawl over – and runs back to her class. Her teacher had to call her twice before she decided to leave and join her friends. She must be on a field trip out here. Felicity remembers those.

Maybe she'll be Dauntless too, Felicity thinks as she watches the kid wave one last time before she climbs on the school bus. She certainly had glared at Blood hard enough to make her thinks she was willing to take him right then and there.

She has no idea how she finds herself by his side, but once she's there, he turns his head towards her as if he heard her coming. They're alone, the others already filing in single line in front of the gate so that they can get back to the train.

"You know… I am starting to understand why you left Erudite." She says slowly, keeping her face impassable. Usually she has to look up at his face when she talks to him he's so tall, but right now he's sitting, his eyes a couple of inches lower than hers. And though she has the higher ground between the two, it's starting to feel more unsteady by the second. "You seem to have a knack for making stupid decisions."

He frowns at her.

"It was a five minutes conversation."

"It was five minutes too long." Felicity reiterates immediately. Her eyes are steady on his, and she wants to will him to understand the words she's not saying. "Faction before blood, remember?"

Anger lights up his eyes and though it's silent, she can head the words in his head clearly. 'fuck that'. They're right there – at the clench of his jaw, at the tightening of his fists. Felicity sighs. From this close it's hard to escape the damage to his face. His eye is not quite swollen shut but it's close, the skin looking thin and red around it. It will bruise badly – same as his cheekbone and jaw is bruising. The split over his lip looks like it stings and the one over his eyebrow had to have stitches.

Before she knows what she's doing or even reasons why, she reaches out, fingertips brushing against the side of his face where the bruises are already turning yellow. He doesn't move, doesn't even breathe.

"You know… you will start doing better once you realize that you have to attack first."

He blinks slowly. "That would help?"

Felicity nods. "Go on offence. You're fast for someone of your stature - though not as fast as Lance, nor as smart."

He huffs, but his eyes are still trained very carefully on her, listening like he's taking in every word and branding it against his brain.

"She fights smart – you could stand to learn a thing or two from her. Throw your whole body into every hit, never take your eyes off your opponent and when you see an opening, go in and jam to the throat."

His eyes widen just a little bit and that's when Felicity realizes how cold she must sound to him.

Her hand falls to her side just as her heart meets the bottom of her feet.

"I'm surprise you know all that." He says slowly, his voice low and a bit rough around the edges. "Considering you walked out of my one and only fight."

Felicity gulps. This time she does look away.

"Yeah. It wasn't something I wanted to watch." But before he can ask her what she means by that, she nudges his foot with hers. "Come on, train should be here any minute, we have to move."

She turns around and walks away but in a couple of steps, he's right by her side again.

"What do you think is out there?" he asks, his long steps keeping up with her smaller, faster ones. Felicity's finger twitch.

Stop asking so many questions.

"Do you know?"

No she doesn't. And she doubts anyone does, no matter how readily answers leaves people's mouths.

"Let's just say that the fence was built for a reason." She chooses to say instead. A non-answer answer. She knows them well. Oliver's eyes hold hers and she's thinking he knows them well too. It's like he can hear the words she doesn't say. The thought makes her uncomfortable enough to want to fidget. Instead she just walks faster.

Yes, the wall was built for a reason. But usually the reasons for those kind of things are only two: to keep people out, or to keep people in. And nobody here really know which one it is.

"Yeah, everything around here has a reason." Oliver says as he eyes the closing gate behind them, separating the city from the Amity fields behind the wall. "But it kinda makes me wonder what that reason is, if they have to lock the door from the outside."

Felicity stops in her tracks, her head jerking to look at him. Oliver stops too, like he's waiting for her. She leans closer to him, almost an inch from his face and Oliver braces, tells himself not to back away. He doesn't really want to, but he can't do what he wants to do either.

Absently, he wonders if the way his stomach falls to his feel whenever she comes close to him is because he fears her a little bit despite what he tells himself… or because of something else.

He knows he doesn't fear her. So it must be something else.

His palms sweat.

"Those are the kind of thoughts you should keep to yourself, Queen."

And it's like she's telling him to be careful all over again, just like she did his first day. It seems to him sometimes that that's all she tells him to do, no matter with which words she chooses to do it with.

The train starts to move and they have to run to catch it. She jumps in first. This time, when she extends her hand to help him in, Oliver doesn't hesitate to grab it.


	7. War-Games

**7**. _War games_

He starts training almost obsessively, after. Felicity thinks she recognizes his compulsion for what it is, because she used to be the same. Who's she kidding: she's _still_ the same! She wasn't exactly walking through the training rooms at the crack-ass of dawn for the scenery, when she caught sight of him there. He lifts weights, practices his punches and goes through the basic katas that Felicity and Isabel have taught all the initiates. Sometimes there's John with him, most times he's alone.

For the total of three minutes, Felicity thinks she sees herself in him, but then she realizes that she's just projecting. He's not compulsive, like her; he's tenacious. The difference between them in that is as wide as the Pit and as deep as the Chasm. She's single-minded, rather than determined like him, and for her it was because she felt helpless and wanted to get over it. For Oliver… it's just the way he seems to be built.

It's also about survival for him in a different way than it used to be for her. Felicity didn't train like a machine because there was the threat of becoming factionless hanging over her head if she didn't get better. She used to train - and still _does_ \- because she is afraid all the time and the only way she knows how to control that, how to live through it, is by getting herself to a point where she can feels stronger than that fear. And the reason why she keeps using the main training rooms instead of the more private ones meant for the higher-ranked officers, is because those wide and open spaces where initiates train are the first rooms where Felicity ever felt strong and in control. It's why she volunteered to be an instructor, after all.

She helps Oliver the way she helps all the others, though after that one time when she sees him without his T-shirt on and catches more than an eyeful of what he looks like beneath it, she avoids touching him as much as she can. ( _He's still lean, but his muscle mass is starting to increase. They stand out, wiry and tight beneath his skin._ ) It's a strange equation to balance: ' _where do I touch him, for how long, how much is acceptable? How much would be too little and stand out_?' It keeps her mind on occupied by the thought of her hands on his body for a lot longer than she should be comfortable with, which ironically doesn't really help with the impulse itself. It doesn't help with the idle wonderings that fly by her imagination either, and both are so foreign that Felicity doesn't really know how to deal with them other than ignoring them.

She does smile when he knocks down his next opponent, but that satisfaction is pushed aside the moment the fight ends, and he walks to Taina and helps her up and out of the ring because she was too dizzy to walk on her own. Felicity can understand why: there is no real satisfaction in knocking down a girl like Taina, who can't throw a punch right even if someone was controlling her arms. She just wishes he wouldn't be so quick to demonstrate his real nature where people like Isabel or Blood can see it.

It's becoming harder and harder to catch sight of it though, as he wraps himself up in resolve like it's a cocoon of steel. Felicity can actually see him hardening, his strength growing into something more than a hidden glint in his serious gaze, and she finds herself almost hypnotized at the sight of him changing like this, adapting right in front of her eyes. It's beautiful, honestly.

It makes her want to push him harder than everyone else, just to see how much pressure he can take. How far out she can throw him and still see him land on his feet – or see him get up regardless, even if he falls flat on his face. It's inspiring, looking at him.

It makes her want to pick at his vulnerabilities too, the way she used to pick at her own scabs.

Both impulses make her feel like she's lower than human.

o

The Dauntless call them war-games. Felicity has never understood why. The words put together like that are an oxymoron if she ever lived one and out in the field, the only part of them that makes it a 'game' instead of all-out war is the fact that they don't use real bullets or explosives.

She'd rather call it what it is: survival training.

Laurel finds her as she's tightening the laces of her boots. They get ready in silence together and Felicity is reminded of one of Laurel's best attributes as a friend: unlike most dauntless, she is perfectly content and at ease in silence and never feels the need to fill unless she has something real to say. They haven't had that much time to just be around each other lately and a part of Felicity wants to add it up to the fact that they've both been busy, but she knows that laurel can hold a grudge like it's an art from too. So when she hands Felicity the ammo and helps her fix her ponytail into a tight bun on top of her head, Felicity knows that this is the closest to 'I'm sorry' Laurel is likely to get.

She doesn't like it, and she thinks they need to talk about some things – namely the way Laurel's expectations of everyone have the unpleasant habit of turning into demands, but the time for that is certainly then.

They share a look and it's like they can read that same thought in each other's eyes. One shallow nod from Laurel and Felicity knows that means 'later'.

"Is it gonna be ' _capture the flag_ ' again this year?" Laurel asks as she puts on her leather gloves. They file out of the changing rooms behind Isabel, heading for the transfer's dormitory just as Nyssa disappears through the opposite corridor to gather the dauntless-born.

Felicity shakes her head.

Laurel responds with a slow 'huh' but doesn't ask again because they've just entered the dormitories with they're flashlights on, and Isabel bangs loudly against the doors with her steel-tipped boots, jumpstarting the initiates out of their sleep.

"Everybody on your feet!" She roars.

The flashlights pierce the darkness. Felicity can see the initiates sitting up on their bed, squinting through the darkness to see what's going on.

The semidarkness does nothing to dull the way Oliver's eyes immediately grab hers and hold them. ( _For one heartbeat she wonders if maybe he is as aware of her as she is of him an that's why his eyes land on her first and stay there. But then she dismisses the thought as way too self-centered to be true_.) He's half-sitting on his bed, hair mused and features still soft with sleep. It feels surprisingly intimate, looking at him like this and even though there's about 20 people around them, for a moment that seems to stretch like honey off a jar, everything gets quiet. Creeping tendrils of warmth slide against the back of her neck. She rolls her shoulders to shake them off. It only works partially.

"Did you go deaf, beauty queen? Get the fuck up!" Isabel thunders, glaring a hole in Oliver's face. He jump to his feet with the rest of the initiates. Felicity looks away from him, just as startled by Isabel's yell as he has been.

 _You're slipping_ …

She thinks she sees Laurel throwing her a curious look but it's gone before anyone – even Felicity – can make sure it was ever there.

"You have five minutes to get dressed and meet us by the tracks," Isabel enunciates, her voice bouncing off the walls. This is the most exited Felicity has ever heard her. War-games always were her favorite part of training, even back when they were both initiates themselves. "We're going on another field trip."

o

Laure's eyes itch the back of her neck but Felicity feels safe in the knowledge that Laurel knows better than to ask questions with Isabel within hearing distance. She and Nyssa talk quietly to themselves instead, as they wait for the initiates to gather by the tracks. Shado sits with her ankles crossed as Felicity checks her knives and her supplies, carefully taking note of everything she has on her bag-pack and going over the list of things she will need to teach her team; the list of things she might need. She wonders on the reasons for the secrecy behind this year's mission parameters; about the needs her team is going to face and how to overcome them. About _who_ will be part of her team.

She already has some very specific idea on that.

The initiates file close to the tracks, forming a semicircle around the older Dauntless members. Theirs eyes move around, taking in everything, trying to figure things out. They linger on Shado and Laurel since none of them have ever seen either woman around much other than the occasional glance in the pit or at the tattoo-parlor. They don't dare look too long at Nyssa though. Nyssa's lips curve up on in that particular dangerous smile of hers, arms crossed, feet apart, looking every bit as unshakable as she is.

Felicity spots Oliver's head close to the piled ammunition. He's looking at her like he expects her to offer some kind of explanation, but this is not her floor. It's Isabel's.

"Everyone grab a bag-pack and a gun." Isabel shouts.

They all rush to the piled weapons.

Isabel turns to Felicity. "Time estimate?"

Felicity rolls her eyes, actually annoyed but playing it off lightly. "Any minute now. How long do you think is going to take you to memorize the train schedule?"

Isabel's smile is sharp as knives. "Why should I, when I have _you_ to remember it for me."

Felicity raises one single eyebrow at that, but chooses not to say anything. She walked into that one with her own feet and she's irritated at herself for it.

When the train passes through, Felicity is the first one to get on it. She turns and sees Oliver right behind her, running ahead and grabbing one of the handles on the outside of the car, pulling himself on the train, his weapon slung across his back, secured in place by the thick straps. The muscles on his forearms strain as they support his weight, but he gets in easily now, as if he doesn't have six feet plus of height to work with. The swelling on his face has gone down and his bruises are mostly a light green and yellow now, but they're still there. He has a three days' worth of stubble on his face and it makes him look older than his 20 years… it makes Felicity acutely aware of her own age for the first time in a long time.

Felicity looks away.

Once everyone is in, Nyssa speaks up.

"This excursion is part of this year's war-games. You will be divided into two teams, each team will have an even mix of members, Dauntless-born initiates, and transfers. Isabel and Four are captains; Laurel and Shado will be their respective second in command."

Laurel groans softly behind her and Felicity bites the inside of her cheek to stop her smile. Laurel _despises_ Isabel and she's never made a secret of it.

"The teams will have opposing missions. You will find the parameters of said missions once you are on site – depending on which camp you manage to find." The car sways and those that can, grabs the side of the doorway for balance. Nyssa though doesn't seem to feel the difference at all – her feet seem to be glued to the floor. "This is a Dauntless tradition, so I suggest you take it seriously."

"What are _you_ going to do?" Laurel asks, tilting her head to the side as she looks Nyssa over. A slow smile spreads on Nyssa's face.

"Let's see who gets to find that out first." She says by ways of an answer, winking at Laurel, who rolls her eyes but doesn't contain her smirk.

Felicity looks away from them, choosing to stare ahead instead. That living, breathing thing that exists between Nyssa and Laurel has a way of filling up any room, so Felicity is well aware that for them, this is subtle. There are times when even glancing at them feels like an intrusion, because they have this way of looking at each other that makes even a stare feel as intimate – and uncomfortable - as sex.

"What do we get if we win?" someone shouts.

Nyssa scoffs.

"Sounds like the kind of question someone not from Dauntless would ask," Felicity says, raising an eyebrow. "You get to win, of course."

"Weapon of choice. " Isabel say as she steps in the middle of the car, holding up the plastic rifle with one hand. "It weighs about as much as a real rifle to get you used to carrying one around at any time."

Bertinelly snorts. "How much you wanna bet we'll be shooting paintballs?" she says, not bothering to be quiet about it.

Isabel straightens the rifle and shoots the girl right in the thigh. The shock of it sends Helena slamming against the wall of the car, her head banging on the glass before she slides down with a groan.

Isabel steps forward and gets the dart out from Helena's thigh.

"Neurostim-darts." She explains as she shows them all the little bullet-shaped dart with a small pleased smile. "Simulates the pain of a _real_ gunshot wound. Only lasts a couple of minutes." She looks at Felicity then. "Let's divide up transfers first, shall we?"

Felicity tilts her head back just a little. "You pick first."

Because Isabel is predictable. Felicity already knows she'll chose Lawton. When she does, Felicity leans against the door of the cart, crosses her arms over her chest absently as she scans the group of initiates carefully.

She doesn't know what they'll be doing, but she knows _where_ they'll be gong, which is knowledge enough for the first tendrils of a strategy to start weaving together in her head.

"I'll take Lance."

Isabel just chuckles. "Got something to prove, Four? Or are you picking the weak ones on purpose so you can have someone to blame when you lose?"

On Isabel's right, Laurel's eyes flash dangerously at the back of Isabel's head. Felicity lets her smile show this time, teeth and all, and for a moment both of them are back into their old training room, Isabel's eyes cold and calculating; Felicity's smile feral and bloody.

She shrugs, every inch of her body telling of how laid back she is in this. "Something like that."

"Fine." Isabel snaps. "Diggle, you're with me."

"Holt." Felicity says decisively.

"Blood."

Of course she would chose him. Felicity had been counting on it. "Queen."

Isabel narrows her eyes. "Bertinelli."

Felicity nods at that. She'd wanted Helena on her own team but she had also been prepared that Isabel would chose her.

"Andy." Felicity says, checking out the chirped coat of black nail polish. Andy could come in useful in any place at any time, because though he seems good-natured, he has a knack for playing dirty.

"Donner."

"Grant."

"Last one's Taina, so she's with me." Isabel says, though by the scowl on her face she doesn't like it one bit. "Dauntless-born initiates next."

As the teams are divided Oliver moves by Four's side with the rest of the initiates she chose. He has no idea why she picked the ones she did, so he eyes his team, trying to find what they all have in common. Sara is already on edge – anger simmering at being called weak by Isabel in front of everyone and her own sister too. She's glowering at the other team. Oliver wants to tell her to tone it down some, but he knows it won't help any.

Every once in a while, he sneaks a glance at Four. She is leaning against the wall of the car looking perfectly at ease in her tightly-laced combat boots and a rifle hanging off her side like it belongs there. Four's eyes are intent on the rest of the initiates, arms crossed loosely over her vest, hair pinned in a pun high on her head. She and the other, older Dauntless, Shado, haven't exchanged a single word, but there is something about the ease between them, about the very way they stand side by side and share silent looks every once in a while, that tells Oliver they know each other well.

He'd stared a little earlier – seeing her without her usual maroon lipstick on had taken him by surprise.

It makes her look more vulnerable somehow. Younger. The steel in her eyes juxtaposes that idea completely though and he doesn't know what to believe.

After they finish choosing teams, Isabel's eyes land on Four.

"Your team can get off second." she says curtly.

Four only smiles a little.

"Don't do me any favors." She says in that settled, calm way of hers. "You know I don't need them to win."

Oliver looks at her, feeling his eyebrows pull in a small frown. It's a strange think to say, for her. Her confidence infuses everything she does: from the way she talks – calm, without ever raising her voice, quietly demanding that everyone else lower their to listen – to the way she walks and carries herself. But it's of the quiet kind. The kind that is just there, like a wall you'll slam against and break, if you make a run for her. Bragging seems to be out of character for her.

But then Oliver notices Isabel's scowl.

"Oh I know. I know that you'll lose no matter what, so you might as well take your scrawny team and go first."

Felicity shrugs, her face as unaffected as ever and Oliver has to turn his face away so that nobody sees the smile he can't keep off it.

Isabel may be ruthless, but Four is smarter. All it takes is a couple of soft nudges in the right places, and Isabel is already giving her what she wanted - and it's such a calculated exchange and that Isabel never even seemed to notice it happening.

For the first time, Oliver feels like he is really starting to understand Four, and the difference between strength and power that she talks about all the time.

o

Once the two teams are divided, Felicity tells her own to memorize the contents of their bag-packs, check their weapons and ammo and get ready.

"Where are we going?" Oliver asks her. It's all she can do not to snap her head in his direction. She'd never noticed how close he was.

She jerks her head towards the glass panels instead. "See for yourself."

They all turn their heads and see the train heading for the open water of the lake. Murmurs rise up at that, but they're hushed, a blanked of dread already falling among the initiates, transfers and dauntless-born alike.

Even though all lights in the city get turned off after midnight, the darkness that surrounds the lake seems even deeper than the one that falls over the city. There are no outlines of darker buildings here and on a moonless night like this, the darkness becomes consistent and deep. Unforgiving, as it swallows everything. If it weren't for the lights at the head of the train, it would look like they were swimming in it.

The lights inside the train get turned off and as their eyes get used to the darkness, their eyes start picking up the differences out here. The water of the lake reflects what little light the stars can afford and in the distance, one little peck of the horizon looks like it is just a little bit darker than the deep blue of the sky and she shimmery water that surrounds it.

Oliver's head turns to her.

"Are we going to the island?" he asks her, his voice almost a whisper. Felicity nods, her eyes firm on his. His frown deepens.

"I thought faction law prohibited anyone from going there." Andy wonders aloud as he steps closer to the windows.

"It does – and with good reason. Dauntless has been using it as a training grounds for decades." Felicity eyes them all carefully. "It's one giant trap of a hell-hole, so watch yourselves."

"Of _course_ it is." Sara says under her breath, shoulders tense. "Like everything _else_ about Dauntless."

Felicity purses her lips and shares a knowing look with Shado. She understands the craziness of her faction remarkably well, for a Dauntless-born. After all, beneath the windy words that always swirl around every faction, there is a good reason why all the others call the Dauntless crazy: they kind of are, just a little bit. No other explanation could make sense of some of the things they do sometimes.

But this is not one of them. The island is going to scare them, Felicity knows, but it will also push and reveal them.

The train moves through the darkness, getting them closer to their intended grounds. In her head, Felicity calculates where they'll land and what to do from there.

In front of them, the island becomes more noticeable against the starry sky the closer they get to it, a dark and shapeless mass ready to sink its teeth into them.

Felicity steels herself, looks at her team one by one. She knows better than to think she'll be able to protect them, or even want to. But she won't let the darkness swallow them whole either. Her eyes meet Shado's.

Back when she had been a nervous initiate on this train, heading for the island of horrors, like the dauntless-born called it, Shado had been their team captain and from her Felicity had learned an important lesson, one that had become part of her core.

' _If you get hurt, hurt them back. If you get shot, shake it off. When you can't walk, you crawl. And when you can't do that, find someone to carry you_.'

Dauntless may not be a place where this idea can breathe freely anymore, but for this one week that this training exercise ill last, Felicity will be the captain of this team, and that lesson is the one she wants to teach them. it might save their lives one day, the way it had saved hers.

Her eyes land on Oliver and the traitorous whisper comes alive in her head. ' _it might get them killed too…_ ' it tells her. But you could say that for almost anything these days.


	8. The Island: Climb

They fall in single line behind Shado, the way Four tells them to. In the deep darkness of the forest around them, even a whisper carries loudly, despite the wind whispering through the leaves of the ever-green trees around them. Having never left the city all his life, Oliver finds its oppressive silence and foreign sounds that pervade it incredibly eerie. If it weren't for the occasional gust of wind, it would be like being in a nightmare.

"The whole island has been mined so watching your step is important." Four reminds them.

"What?" Sara snaps, eyes wide.

"You mean like, _actual,_ real-life mines?" one of the dauntless-born kids ask, looking down at his feet as if he's just stepped on one.

"No, but if one explodes, it'll make a hell of a lot of noise, for one. It will also incapacitate you for at least a day, and excruciating pain aside, I am not in the mood for carrying dead weight around, so watch yourselves."

She exchanges a look with Shado, who nods and starts moving through the darkness of the forest. They all follow her in single line, like Four told them to. Oliver waits purposefully as the other pass him by, so he can hag at the tail of the line with her.

"So, where are we going?"

Four motions him to move forward and keeps the silence going for so long that Oliver thinks she won't answer him at all.

"Where would _you_ go, if it was you making the decisions?" she asks him instead.

Oliver thinks about it. He doesn't have an answer. He doesn't know the terrain of this place. When he tells her that, one corner of Four's lips tilt upwards.

"So what would you do to _get_ to know it?"

Oliver takes a breath. This isn't very different from getting a quiz in class and he'd always hated those. Proof of that was the fact that he regularly failed at them, so much so that his whole faction became aware of just how badly he did _not_ belong in Erudite. ( _Oliver had chosen to push that a bit further, for a while. After all, if he had to be a fuckup, he might as well take the mantel full on. That ended up being a disaster all into itself, in more ways than one, highlighting his stupidity and selfishness perfectly._ )

"I would seek higher ground, I guess." He tries, his answer sounding a bit like a questions because he's not sure enough to sound firm on it. "Get a look at what I'm dealing with."

Four nods, the look on her face almost satisfied.

"There's a formation of caves north of here – it's got good cover and it's high on the hill, so it's easily defendable. Shado discovered it the last time we were here. That's where we're headed." She explains, glancing at the deep darkness surrounding them every once in a while.

"And then what?" Oliver asks, his breaths coming heavier. It's getting harder to keep up with the fact pace Shado is setting, keep from tripping on the roots that cover almost every inch of the ground he is walking, and talk at the same time.

"Then you all have to come up with a feasible strategy for figuring this situation out." Four says simply.

Oliver just blinks at her and ends up falling a little behind. She urges him to move forward with a barely-there push against the small of his back. It occurs to him then that there is a reason she doesn't surpass him, but instead urges him to keep moving forward instead. Shado is at the head, their first line of defense, while Four is at the tail, watching all their backs.

He doesn't know what to say to that, how to put into words what that makes him feel so he focuses on what she said instead.

" _We're_ supposed to come up with a strategy?"

"You're the initiates." She tells him, like it's obvious. "Of course you're the ones that have to come up with a strategy."

Oliver just gapes at her.

"We don't even know what we're supposed to be doing here, Four." He says then, his voice just a little lower. And it's strange that he should be so open with her, but at the same time it's not. There's something about her that makes him feel like he can talk to her. Like he can say anything and she'd just take it in stride. In a learning setting, that is. He doesn't know how much he could talk to her out of it. Four doesn't really look like someone who's into small talk, as proved by the one and only time he tried that with her and she almost bit his head off.

In his defense, it had been his first day. He knows better now.

"We know some things." She says cryptically. Oliver opens his mouth to ask her what, but she interrupts him. "Walk now, talk later. Move."

And that's her 'instructor' voice he's hearing. The flat, no-nonsense one he's gotten used to hearing in the training room, so he does as he's told.

o

The caves are hard to find, hidden as they are behind trees and a formation of stones. It's a good thing, Felicity decides. They're well protected here, it's a good spot for camp.

It takes the initiates a while to get settled. It's harder for the Dauntless-born than it is for the transfers to do that while also being quiet, but eventually, they shut up.

"So, now that we're here – let's talk strategy." Felicity invites as she sits one of the protruding rocks of the cave formation. They're lucky it's big enough to fit all of them. The blue glow of the light-sticks they all carry is low enough not to be noticeable in the dark and that was the only reason Felicity allowed them to keep the little things on. It does give all the initiates a strange look though – like they're all standing underwater.

"How can we?" Sara starts. Felicity is not surprised she's the first to talk. "We know literally nothing. Not where we are or what we're supposed to do. What kind of strategy can we talk about?"

The others murmur in ascent.

"Alright, so let's start with what we _do_ know and take it from there." Felicity counters calmly. She doesn't mind taking them into this step by step. Most of them aren't used to thinking like this, but team work and strategy is what this exercise is supposed to be about, no matter what the new Dauntless policies say.

For a long while, nobody says anything.

"We know we're on an island." Oliver starts. Heads turn his way and for a moment he seems uncomfortable with the attention but pushes through it. "And since we got off first we're probably somewhere on the south side of it."

Felicity nods. "Yes. What else?"

"There's a camp we're supposed to find. And the parameters of our mission are supposed to be there. But we don't know where that is." Kendra, one of the Dauntless-born adds.

"And we don't know where Isabel and her team are either." Some else adds.

"We should find them. Split into two grounds tomorrow and while one searches for the camp, the other scouts for Isabel's team."

Felicity lets them talk it all out, try to figure out the way to do things. In her head, she is trying to get behind Isabel's eyes and think like her. She already knows what the most efficient course of action is, but she's waiting to see if someone from the initiates gets there first.

"You guys do remember what Nyssa said?" Everyone turns to look at Shado, who had been leaning against the wall of the cave the whole time, watching them in silence. "She said the mission parameters are going to be opposite. Whatever it is the other team is up to, we'll have to stop them."

"Or the other way around. Depending on who finds the camp first." Sara reminds her.

"Exactly." Shado says with a nod. "Now, knowing Isabel, she waited at least 30 minutes to jump off the train, which means the chances that she's headed for the eastern side of the island are pretty decent."

"Why?"

"Because the forest there is thick and provides better coverage than in the northern fields, and the terrain is easier to scale than wester shores." Shado explains, steady and patient as ever.

Felicity takes a deep breath and leans back. The rocky surface of the cave digs on her back but she doesn't move. She knows what Shado's getting at. If she's right, Isabel has already found the camp.

A plan's already forming her head when she hears Oliver's voice – much closer than she'd expected.

"We should scale the cliffs we saw coming here to get a good vantage point. We should do it tonight too, while it's dark."

Felicity feels the words travel down her spine like a touch. She resists the urge to shake them off and turns her head to the right instead, to look at him. She hadn't noticed how he had gravitated closer to her, sitting just close enough for his words to be heard despite the fact that his voice was pitched so low nobody else caught them.

She tilts her head to the side, considers it.

"Why?"

"They might have found the camp before us. And if they have, we could find out where it is."

Felicity cocks a single eyebrow at him.

"How so?"

Oliver huffs, tips his chin down and arches his eyebrows, giving her a look of both disbelief and obvious intent. It makes his eyes look round and even wider.

"Because this is _Isabel_. She's proud enough to flaunt it if she found the camp first. How much do you wanna bet she's had her team light a bonfire or something?"

Felicity purses her lips to hide her smile.

"Alright then." She says as she stands up and rubs her hands on thighs to smooth her pants down. "How are your scaling skills, Queen."

He jumps to his feet. "They're pretty decent."

o

She leaves the camp and patrolling in Shado's hands and heads out with Oliver to scale the cliffs north of the caves. It's not a difficult climb, but it's made more so because of the depth of the darkness that engulfs them. And it's high too, Felicity notes absently, even as she steels herself.

But she set out for the climb without a second thought nonetheless. In fact, she'd said 'yes' to the idea almost before she'd completely thought it through, which was a Dauntless enough trait, Felicity thinks ruefully as she walks through the trees, but not very normal for _her_. And yet… here she was, getting ready to climb some 200 feet off the ground. She couldn't very well let Oliver go alone – he was one of the initiates and she was the captain of his team. He was her responsibility. But also because… well, because it turned out that it would be just the two of them and nobody would wonder why, or question it, or find it suspicions. And it was such a rare circumstance that it had kind of dragged Felicity along before her brain could really process what she would be doing in the meantime.

"Put your gloves on." She tells him, but he's already tightening the strap around his wrist. Good.

She looks up at the dark rocks. Knowing that she'll be up there soon enough makes her palms sweat and her throat feel dry. But Oliver shows no such problem as he climbs up the side. She looks at him for a few moments, how he doesn't hesitate to get going, takes in his surefootedness and certainty, his unwavering focus, and it's strange… she sees her hand grab the first protruding lock and feels her body being pulled up and it's almost like she's doesn't belong beneath her own skin.

Heights been a fixture in her fear landscape for years. Felicity doesn't think they'll ever go away, which means she doesn't really want to be here, climbing this death-trap… but she wants to do this with him, and that want is stronger than her fear.

It's a foreign feeling, but she likes it. She likes the way it pushes her forward to catching up with him.

She does – faster than he probably thought she would if the look he gives her is anything to do by. Felicity allows herself a smile. He may fearless up here, but she's faster.

"Slow down." She warns.

"I'll be fine." Is his answer, and judging from the tightness in his voice he thinks she told him that for his benefit, instead of her own.

She huffs. "I'm sure you will be. But you should still take it easy. I doubt those ribs of yours don't hurt anymore."

He stops and looks at her over his shoulder. He doesn't say anything and it's too dark see the expression on his face – all she can see on it is sharp angles and deep shadows.

"What do you think we're doing here, Oliver? What's the purpose of this exercise?"

"Survival training in a hostile environment?"

She laughs softly and the wind carries it to him. "Ok, Erudite. What else?"

"Strategy." Oliver says and looks over at her where she keeps climbing. "Teamwork."

This time Four laughs harder and Oliver feels self-consciousness creep at him. He hates being laughed at, but the fact that it's _her_ makes him feel worse, beyond just hurt pride. It actually hurts his feelings a bit, if he's being honest…

"Or not." Oliver dismisses. "Team work doesn't seem to be a Dauntless priority."

"It's supposed to be." Four says breathlessly. "It used to be. Not so much anymore though. But in theory, you'd be right."

But Oliver's not really listening. His every nerve is alive with awareness and for a moment he thinks that his hands are shaking because he's up so high, but he knows instinctively that that's not the answer. He _likes_ the height. He likes the thrill of it, the fact that it makes him aware of every breath in his body and every organ beneath his skin, as if they are all vibrating at the same frequency and for the first time he is right where he's supposed to be and.

It's not the height.

Its' her bursting breaths beside him, the dark hair that have escaped her careful bun and are whipping around her head; the clothes pressing at her sides, highlighting the shape of her body beneath.

Oliver curses between tightly clenched teeth. That's about the stupidest thing he could possibly think about hundred feet off the ground…

Which means it's perfectly in line with him, actually. He's starting to become an expert on stupid things.

But it doesn't really sound so bad when even a couple of hundred feet from the ground, it makes Oliver feel like his bones could vibrate right out of his body at any given moment, but in a good way. The _best_ way!

He turns to her he doesn't even register that he's wearing a smile so big, it should rightly make her think he banged her head hard against the side of the cliff at some point. She's right there next to him. Even though Four started climbing after him, she's about to surpass him now. Even up here she moves more easily than he does, like she's used to pushing her body to the limit and surpassing it. And she probably is; people wouldn't talk about her the way they do, like she's some kind of Dauntless prodigy, if that weren't the case. But she doesn't look comfortable or natural up here, not the way she's always looked doing practically everything else, anywhere else. The look on her face is strained, her every muscle pulled up tight and standing out. He doesn't know if it's just the way she looks in the dark, but she seems a lot paler than she was when they started and she's breathing hard.

The smile melts off his face, a worried frown taking its place.

"Are you ok, Four?"

She huffs and looks at him, eyes glinting inside the dark shadows of their sockets.

"Are you _human_ , Oliver? How are you not scared of being up so high?" Her voice, normally so calm and even, sounds higher than usual, strained.

Oliver smiles. "I've been higher."

He can't really see her rolling her eyes at him, but it's so obvious in her expression that it's not a stretch to imagine it.

It makes him feels like laughing.

"I meant from the ground." She says dryly.

His smile gets wider. "That too."

Oliver looks over his shoulder, considers the distance carefully. He doesn't need to be able to see the ground beneath him clearly to know that he's up pretty high. He can feel the void behind him with the same awareness he feels the wind pulling at his clothes and the cold prickling at his face.

"If I fall now, I'll die, for sure." he says carefully and she huffs as she pulls herself even higher… closer to him. Their eyes meet. She's incredibly still, in that way she has that makes her look almost like she's part stone and could melt into the scenery at any point and disappear completely. "But I don't think I will fall."

Now that his eyes have gotten used to the darkness, he doesn't really feel that blind as the first few hours. He can see the smile curving her lips up for instance, even though Four seems to only allow it to creep on her face once she looks away from him. Oliver is starting to think that her natural expressions, when she's not controlling them, will be subtle and soft, maybe even a bit shy - just like that smile.

Strange, to think of someone who is as unapologetically _present_ in all things as Four, as shy. He has trouble meeting those two concepts in his head, like he's talking about two different people at the same time.

"Thinking you're infallible is a good way get yourself dead, Oliver."

He almost groans but manages to keep it behind his teeth. "Is this you telling me to be careful again?"

"Maybe if you _listened,_ I wouldn't have to repeat it!" she snaps, but her face is smiling and her eyes are alive with hidden laughter.

"Yeah, maybe. 'Careful' has never been something I'm good at anyway."

"I don't give a shit. _Get_ good at it!"

Oliver huffs. Of course she'd say that. If there's one think he's learned in the few weeks as a Dauntless initiate, is that he's expected to meet the limits and then jump over them. It's not strange that the kind of people that want them to jump off moving trains and rooftops, expect their members to always hit the ground running.

"There's a groove in the rock a couple of feet up." She tells him, between one harsh breath and another.

She reaches it before he does and pulls herself up. For one very short moment, Oliver allows himself to stare at her ass as she does. It's one of the rare times he feels safe enough to indulge in that, because he knows that there's nobody around that could catch him and mention it – which means there's no risk of him ending up thrown off the Chasm when Four inevitably hears about it, since Dauntless and subtlety don't seem to go hand in hand.

As he pulls himself up next to her, he can't help the small smile. Yeah, that sight would be worth a beating for sure.

He flops down on the uneven ground, one leg still dangling off the edge and laughs. The muscles on his arms and thighs are burning like they're on fire, but he feels his blood rushing through his veins and his heart racing and it's the most _alive_ he's felt in a long time.

But then he turns and sees Four with her back pressed against the rock and her knees drawl up to her chest, eyes closed and taking breath after controlled breath, her hand gripping one of the protruding rocks beside her so hard it's a wonder it's not crumbling in her palm.

He keeps staring in silence until she finally opens her eyes.

"You're afraid of heights." Oliver says softly. It's not a question.

Felicity huffs at the way he says that – like it's some kind of a revelation. To him, maybe it is.

"Everyone's afraid of something." Felicity says quietly, and it feels not like an admission of weakness, but more like a secret between them. He doesn't know anything about her, but… she wants him to.

She _wants_ him to…

The thought is about as scary as the height.

She realizes, with a startling clarity that she hadn't really connected before, that she trusts him. She trusts him enough to climb up here with him, even though she knew he would get to see her like this. She trusted him with one of her vulnerabilities and it dazes her a little bit, because this is the most she's trusted _anyone_ so thoughtlessly.

Oliver huffs as he shakes his head and settles both his legs inside the groove.

"I didn't think you were afraid of anything." he says, low into the wind, as if to himself.

Felicity bites her lip. God, she feels so stupid – she's hundreds of feet up in the air, and if she dares look down she knows the ground is going to come up against her face so fast she'll feel the helpless pull of vertigo scrambling her brains. And yet in the middle of all that, she can still find room for her insides to flutter. It feels stupid.

It feels real.

"How do you survive in the Dauntless compound?" He asks her then, as if it's just occurred to him.

"By always remembering there are things more important than fear." Felicity shrugs as she turns to the horizon, scanning the deep darkness of the island. "It won't ever go away, so I just ignore it. Pretend it's not there."

He looks at her like he doesn't understand. But before he can press her more on it, he sees a small smile growing on Four's face.

"On your three o'clock." She says simply as she hands him the night-vision binoculars.

There they are. Maybe Isabel didn't light a bonfire, but they sure as hell aren't being careful either. He can see the little dots of light through the trees – he would be able to see them even without the binoculars. It's like Shado said earlier – the forest offers some protection, but apparently not enough.

"They've found the camp then?" Oliver asks.

"Looks like it." Four says. She's standing right by his side, the groove so small that to get a look at horizon where they'd spotted the camp fires and she has to be almost pressed against his side. Oliver feels the flutter move his insides around and settle low in his gut, like it did before.

 _Oh for fuck's sake; get it together, Queen!_

Instead he chooses to focus on why the hell she sounds so calm about the fact that they've barely started the game and are already losing ground, so he turns to face her… and what he sees on her face gives him pause.

"You _wanted_ them to…" And this is not a question either, but this time he doesn't understand why. "That's why you wanted our team to get off first. You _wanted_ Isabel to be the one to find the camp."

The more he talks the more pieces fall into place, like a puzzle he couldn't get a full look on before.

"Why?"

"Why do you think?"

Oliver groans, rubs a hand down his face. How the fuck should he know why?! He has no idea how her brain works, why she does the things she does. Sometimes she seems to him completely random, other times he can almost see the peppering of reasons beneath every decision, like a fine string connecting them all together.

But that's not how Dauntless do things… is it?

It sounds more Erudite than anything else.

A moment later Oliver rolls his eyes at himself. It sounds like he's overthinking it. Just because he's got a secret, it doesn't mean everyone else does.

"I have no earthly idea why you do anything, Four." He says, sounding almost resigned.

"Think about it." She insists stubbornly, steps a bit closer to him, like that would help. "Think about how I chose my team. Try to guess why."

She's asking him to see things through her eyes but he looks at those eyes of hers, deep set and dark and he things, 'I can't. I don't think there's anyone who can.' Nobody would ever be able to imitate her. She seems to be so apart from everything else even while fitting in perfectly. He doesn't know how to walk the halls of her thoughts, they're a mystery to him.

But strategy isn't. Well, it is, but _shouldn't_ be. And that's what this exercise is about. There's something here she's trying to get through his head, so Oliver tries again.

What does everyone on their team have in common? He goes over all of them, trying to see some, pattern, some kind of characteristic that would leave them in the same platform.

"You picked the small and fast ones." He says as he thinks of Sara and Andy and a bunch of other dauntless-born kids he doesn't know. "But then there's me, and Curtis and… yeah there's a bunch other others that are bigger. None of us stands out for particularly anything. There are a couple of good shooters know but that's about it."

She looks at him for a moment that seems interminable.

"Ever heard of 'search and destroy' Oliver?"

He shakes his head.

"No."

"That's what we'll be playing this week."

They plant a grappling hook deep into the wall of rock in front of them and Four pulls at it a couple of times to make sure it's secure before attaching the rope to it and securing it in the harness around her middle. She hands it to Oliver after, so he can do the same thing and they start scaling down.

"So what do we all have in common?" He finally asks her when they're about halfway down.

"You're all smart." She says succinctly.

Feeling it like it's a compliment paid personally to _him_ would be a stretch, but Oliver can't really help it.

"I still don't get why you just let them get ahead like that. Wouldn't it have been easier get settled in the camp and fulfill whatever mission we found there? I mean, you said it yourself, the point of this whole thing is winning."

Four chuckles under her breath as she carefully feels out a place to put her foot in, as she climbs down. She's breathing hard again, and doesn't really seem calmer than she was when they were going out, but she still answers him.

"Yeah it is. That's the point of the game. But there's more to being Dauntless than the war-games. Part of it is also being willing to make things harder for yourself."

Oliver frowns. "What…" he stops, because his fingers almost slip from his perch and his heart jumps to his throat for a moment but then finds leverage again. "What does that have to do with bravery?"

"Nothing. But it has everything to do with becoming self-sufficient. It's why we train you the way we do." She grits her teeth, expels a slow breath and starts moving again. He's never heard her talking so much and he likes it. He likes talking to her, with her, hearing her thoughts. But he also thinks she's just dong it to distract herself. "We're the warrior faction, tasked with the defense of our city. We're not supposed to need help. We're supposed to become capable of anything. _That_ is the point."

Oliver nods, even though he knows she can't see him. He likes that. He likes it a lot actually. Because it means that if the time comes when there is no guiding light and no helping hand, and everything is going to shit, he's going to be ready for it. And he wants to be.

But as proved by the next few moments – he's a long way away from that yet.

Because the little grove where he had put his right foot on crumbled and immediately after, his hand slipped and Oliver found himself hurdling through air, the feeling of weightlessness surprising him enough that for a moment he forgot to be afraid. But then he felt his arm being pulled hard enough to think maybe he'd popped his shoulder and he was slammed back into the reality of Four having caught him through the air, both her arms wrapped around his forearm as she swung from the safety rope.

"Oliver, look at me." She grits out, voice strained.

"I'm okay." He says unthinkingly, trying to find purchase against the face of the cliff again.

She ignores him completely.

"You're hooked to the safety line." She says as she secures the rope through his and snaps the hook in place. "I'm going to let you go now. You'll go down slowly. Got it?"

"Yeah."

She does let him go and Oliver starts falling. It's not as sudden as if was before but the speed is still pretty much the same. Except this time Oliver can control it. He pulls on the rope and slows himself down just in time before his feet hit the ground hand and collapse beneath his weight. He pulls his arms in and rolls with the momentum of it to keep from getting hurt.

He ends up sprawled on the grass, little rocks poking at his back, laughing.

He hears the zipping sound of Four making her way down as he had and then her almost silent footsteps as she runs to him.

"Oliver? Queen!"

"Yeah." He manages, still smiling.

"Are you alright?" she sounds doubtful and Oliver can relate. He bets he looks pretty out of it laying there, laughing his ass of after he almost died.

He thinks about her letting go of the face of the cliff and snatching him right out of the air despite her fear of heights and the fact that he had almost twice his weight. His laughter subdues and he becomes very aware of the way her gloved fingers are pressing against the inside of his elbow and her other hand rests over his fast-beating heart.

He doesn't know what makes him reach for her hands on his chest and squeeze her fingers. Adrenaline probably. It must have flooded his brain and made him stupider than usual.

"I'm okay."

"You're also insane." She breathes out, eyes wider than he's ever seen them.

Oliver huffs and shrugs.

"Well, no one can have everything."

She lets out a long breath and then shakes her head. She shoves at his shoulder before getting up. Had it been anyone else, anywhere else, maybe she might have given him a bit more time to get his legs beneath him, but she was Dauntless, and so was Oliver supposed to be, so she just smiles and extends her hand for him to take. He does and she pulls him to his feet. For once, she looks as excited as Oliver feels.

"So... what is 'search and destroy' exactly?"


End file.
